Multiverse Crime Generator 2016

[uristjack]

I am planning on participating! Yeah!

I'm going with a story compiler approach, as originally come up with by cpressey.

I am going to go with crimes. I have twelve so far - those remarked upon by Italo Calvino in his essay "Prose and Anticombinatorics". I'm probably going to add more.

The approach will go like so - plot generated, events generated, necessary amount of characters generated (murder crimes remove characters), assign actors and victims to these crimes, and then generate the sentences related to these stories.

[uristjack]

I've got 15 crimes altogether.

• Murder by knife
• Murder by strangulation
• Murder by inducement to suicide (think persuasion + insults)
• Appropriation of will by blackmail
• Appropriation of will by a threat with a revolver
• Appropriation of will by being drugged
• Appropriation of secrets by spying
• Appropriation of secrets by extortion
• Appropriation of secrets by confidence abuse
• Appropriation of sex by seduction
• Appropriation of sex by buying favours
• Appropriation of sex by rape
• Appropriation of money by being mugged by revolver
• Appropriation of money by scam (probably a rigged gambling game)
• Appropriation of money by selling counterfeit goods

Also, I have a repository for it here: Crime Write - My NaNoGenMo2016.

[uristjack]

OK, so I have a plan.

Here's the structure:

• Plot of crimes generated
• Plot turned into event structures
• Random characters generated
• Event structures filled out with random characters and generated sentences
• [MAYBE] Generated stories in LaTeX format, turned into PDF

If I can create a complicated enough plot I figure 50k words should be easy!

[uristjack]

I can't figure out how to generate random characters, and keep them consistent. Rather than doing what I should do, and be intelligent and figure out the problem, I'm going to reframe the situation - which means no problem!

Since each of my crimes have two characters - an aggressor and a victim - I can merely say that this is a multiverse, where in each universe a different crime occurs. So in Universe 1, John shoots Jane, in Universe 2, he stabs her instead, etc. etc.

[uristjack]

OK, So I have finished my second part of my story compiler.

It takes the event template (AKA the plot) generated by storygen.py, and turns them into paragraph templates, filled with placeholder sentences. The next program I need to create is something that turns these placeholders into sentence templates. And after that, I need to take the sentence templates and generate sentences from them. In LaTeX output, so I can automatically turn it into a nice looking PDF.

[uristjack]

HAHAHA I'm finished!

That final stretch was quite painful - considering I decided the best thing to do was code the largest part of the generator in three days.

But I'm done. I have a PDF example here, at ~73k words. I'm pretty pleased with this, myself!