relsqui
commented
8 years ago Neat! Thank you, I hadn't come across your version of this concept yet. I'm not sure yet whether varying beginnings and endings suit my purpose -- the project this is for is intended to be somewhat curated, so it might not come up at all. I definitely like your name for them, though.
Hey...I heard about your story_threading program, and I found it very interesting. I had built a Ruby gem called Prolefeed that is very similar to your program, in the sense of creating stories based on "prewritten, interchangeable parts". It's an example of convergent evolution.
Instead of having specific "beginning" and "ending" passages though, I used 'bookends'. These are passages that could be used as the beginning or the ending of a story, and I'll let the algorithm decides where to place it instead of my hardcoding the beginning/ending. This adds some slight variation to the story itself. This generally works, as the "conclusion" paragraphs in my stories are merely restating points made in the introductory paragraphs. I think such an approach may have been slightly flexible to text generation (it might be easier to handwrite "bookend" paragraphs than it is to handwrite a specific introductory or a conclusion paragraph).
As a side note...Bookends are technically optional, and are not necessary in Prolefeed. It is possible to generate a story where the paragraphs ('scenes' in "story_threading") were in random order. In fact, I think the first two short stories I generated using Prolefeed had no bookends.
This is just a suggestion, and you are free to reject bookends if you think your tool is meant to generate different types of stories than my program. Either way, I wish you luck on your project.