machines that improvise

Back in the 80s, someone came out with a program called racter that told stories, based on a simple templating system. There were also versions of a more sophisticated program from the 60s called eliza floating around, which simulated a therapist by asking questions, examining the answers, and asking more questions based on the user's answers. I read about stuff like this in the computer magazines that I devoured as a kid.

So ever since I learned to improvise, I've always been intrigued by the idea of integrating a machine that improvises into a show. There's not much room for this in our podcast format, but some of us in Radiostar have worked on multimedia stage improv shows, and it might fit in there. I guess we could do it with audio somehow in the podcast, but that room is already full of technology to navigate when we record, and anyway, if it worked really well, people probably wouldn't believe it was improvised. We have that problem already.

There's lots of machine improvisation around on the web. One example is a slick site that generates fake ads using images from flickr: the ad generator. Something like this would be great to just throw up on a screen and react to during an improv show. An operator could punch in keywords and see what comes up; we did this during shows with Google images, and people loved it.

(via the generator blog, a source for all sorts of clever things like this).