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A Japanese short story writing competition is opening the field next year to include, somewhat unusually, non-human entrants - machines with artificial intelligence (AI).
Working with Japan¹s top business broadsheet, the Nikkei, the Nikkei's Shinichi Hoshi literary award is expecting its first entries from software written to ape storytelling - in this case, short story writing.
A leading contender is a programme written by Hitoshi Matsubara, a professor at Hokkaido's Future University Hakodate and a leader in the AI field. He and his team of computer programmers are attempting to create machine generated short stories not unlike those of Japanese master of the craft Shinichi Hoshi, who died in 1997, and is known as the "god of short story writing" in Japan.
A prolific science fiction writer, Hoshi was a master of the four-page, 8000-word story, know as "short-shorts" in Japan, of which he wrote over 1000.
Professor Matsubara aims to write software good enough to generate short short stories like Hoshi's automatically through research he has dubbed the "Capricious Artificial Intelligence - I am a Writer - Project".
"We are analysing Shinichi Hoshi's short short stories and looking for methods on how computers make new ideas and how computers generate stories from those ideas," said the professor. "We are making progress and should have a passable example by mid 2015."
The Japanese are not alone in developing such so-called machine learning AI to write stories. The Associated Press news agency is using technology to generate thousands of financial reports without the need of reporters.
Some other publishers have gone further. A 320-page novel in 2008 written by a computer in less than a week was published by Russian publisher Astrel-SPb in 2008. While a initiative launched with the help of EU money called the What-If Machine project kicked off last year to build a software system able to "invent stories, jokes, films, paintings and advertisements".