Emergent Story Generation: Lessons from Improvisational Theater

An emergent approach to story generation by computer is characterized by a lack of predetermined plot and a focus on character interaction forming the material for stories. A potential problem is that no interesting story emerges. However, improvisational theater shows that – at least for human actors – a predetermined plot is not necessary for creating a compelling story. There are some principles that make a successful piece of improvisational theater more than a random interaction, and these principles may inform the type of computational processes that an emergent narrative architecture draws from. We therefore discuss some of these principles, and show how these are explicitly or implicitly used in story generation and interactive storytelling research. Finally we draw lessons from these principles and ask attention for two techniques that have been little investigated: believably incorporating directives, and late commitment

Red blood cell segmentation using guided contour tracing

We present a model-based contour tracing approach to the problem of automatically segmenting a Scanning Electron Microscope image of red blood cells. These images characteristically have high numbers of overlapping cells and relatively smooth contours. We provide a brief look into what problems conventional algorithms encounter when attempting to segment these images, and go on to show that a model-based contour tracing approach attains high levels of accuracy and almost no false negatives.PublishedNon Peer ReviewedCanny, J. F. (1986). “A Computational Approach to Edge Detection” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 8: 679–714. Fitzgibbon, A., Pilu, M. & Fisher, R. B. (1999). “Direct Least Square Fitting of Ellipses” IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. 21(5). Simpson, L. (1989). “Blood from healthy animals and humans contains nondiscocytic erythrocytes” British Journal of Haematology. 73: 561–564

Narrative inspiration: using case based problem solving for emergent story generation

We consider a system that can generate stories as a creative system. One approach to building such a system is to simulate and narrate the behaviour of believable characters in a virtual story world. A risk of this approach is that no interesting story emerges. In order to make the behaviour of the characters more interesting from a story perspective, we propose a system that can use example story pieces, written from a plot perspective by a human author, to inspire decisions for characters in an emerging story.\ud On a more philosophical note, we discuss the story generation process in the light of a characterization of creative systems and show that considering an automated story generator as a creative system can help to reveal implicit design choices