By Katie Haegele
Well, this is embarrassing.
I'm in Second Life again.
It's not that I can't leave. Really. It's just that I keep hearing
about all these interesting things that people are doing there.
For instance: A few weeks ago a bulletin went pinging around the
Internet, announcing the unveiling of a new Second Life creation called the
Literature Factory.
What's a Literature Factory? I wondered.
"Well, now, that's a silly question, it's simply a factory that makes
literature," went the waggish message, posted by Factory creator Andy
Fundinger. He described his project as a kind of automated "writer" that
compiles letters into words, words into sentences, and sentences into a
book-length work.
Fundinger is an engineer by training whose interest in the project is
technical rather than literary. Still, his inspiration came from a
well-loved book, One Two Three Infinity by physicist George Gamow. In the
classic text, which explores the possibilities of math and science, Gamow
describes a long automatic printing press that prints books on its
own, circumventing the need for authors altogether.
Fundinger thought scripting an approximation of this idea in Second
Life would be an interesting challenge, so he did it, using a couple of
his own desktop computers as external servers. Fellow Second Lifer Binnie
Zander then made the visuals for the factory itself, and another SL
friend, Sandhya Patel, did the interior design of the lobbies and office
and all of the robots.
"It was pure fun for me," said Patel, a commercial and children's book
illustrator who lives outside Philadelphia.
Wait, did she say robots? This I had to see.
So I logged onto Second Life and went to the Factory for a
demonstration. The tour was led by Fundinger via his avatar Ciemaar Flintoff and
Sandhya, who appears in SL as a little winged sprite.
Sure enough, there were robots. As the other attendees assembled in the
lobby, they wheeled around, greeting us and offering tea and
sandwiches.
The detail of the rest of the factory was just as charming. Our group
walked along a grated walkway that overlooked the factory floor and
watched as large cylinders called Word-o-Mats spun through different letter
combinations until they made a word of English.
The words were then carried by smiling bots that dropped them one by
one into different bins.
Behind the scenes, Fundinger explained, the Word-o-Mats make a request
to the server, which checks the letter combinations against a
dictionary to make sure the word is real. That word is then sent back to Second
Life and into a BinBot, which itself checks periodically with the
server to find out when new words have been created.
Meanwhile, the sentence-maker connects to the server every 90 seconds
and tells it to make a sentence from the words in the bin, using one of
a few basic forms, such as noun-verb-the-adjective-noun.
As the sentences are created they are copied into a digital "book" one
after the other, thus creating a work of, you know, literature.
Sentences created during the demonstration went like this: "A seven eve
will typify the gaudy scoop. "
And this: "A typed euros will gaily gauche the scaly scampi. "
And this: "The twiggy jived hence erupts the viable vision. "
After the demonstration, the group discussed the nature of literature,
and whether the Factory productions qualify.
"Most people seemed to feel that it could not be literature, primarily
due to a lack of 'quality,' " Fundinger said. "Some said plot, others
said it wasn't understandable. Of course there are works of literature
without plot, and there is literature that few can understand;
consider Finnegans Wake. "
"The factory can be a spark for all kinds of thinking, like 'What is
language?' and 'How much must we read into words to make them make sense
to us? ' " Patel said.
"Given the many people who read [the sentences] in SL, are the
conclusions we come to the same, nearly the same, or totally diverse?"
But my favorite part of the Factory experience was its sense of
humor. One of the robots is named Booker after the United Kingdom's
prestigious literary prize, and in the office a certificate proudly proclaims
Ciemaar the winner of the Pull It Sir Prize.
And as we put down the paper and finish our coffee, the Word-o-Mats are
still working away, not unlike those hypothetical monkeys typing for
eternity. Who's to say what they'll come up with?
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