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The Hofstadter Prize for Machine-Written Narrative was formally
established by the Society for Analytical Engines at its annual
meeting in February 1994, at which
time the rules of the competition were ratified. Submissions were
accepted through April 1996, after
which began the long process of validating and judging. Winners were
announced in late 1997 and were
originally scheduled to be published in a single bound volume for
distribution to members of the Society at its 1998 annual meeting. For reasons complex and
obscure there then followed a period of more than four years during
which the project was in a limbo of sorts. With the publication
of Cheap Complex Devices this
unfortunate situation is at least partially remedied, and the world
can see at last that the era of human storytelling supremacy has
ended.
Although the Hofstadter Competition had its birth in February 1994, its conception, at which I was
present, occurred ten months earlier, in April of 1993. It was during that month that, while a
member of the Human Factors Engineering group of Sun Microsystems, I
attended the annual convention of the Special Interest Group for
Computer-Human Interaction, which was held that year in Amsterdam. One
night, dining alone in a charming subterranean restaurant (whose name
I have since forgotten), I chanced to meet some other SIGCHI
conventioneers, who invited me to join them at their table. There were
about eight people in their group; I have an imprecise recollection.
Nor can I remember how many of that number were men and how many were
women, or where any of them called home.
Among them were hardware engineers and software engineers, linguists
and cognitive scientists. I soon learned that the members of that
dinner party were from two groupsߞcompetitors in
the realm of Artificial Intelligence. Their particular speciality was
Human-Language Storytellersߞcommonly called
“Hals”ߞand they had
come together at this restaurant to agree upon the rules for a Hals
storytelling contest to be sponsored by the Society.
Wine flowed, voices overlapped each other, there was much good cheer
and telling of jokes. But as the evening progressed the jokes became
crisper, more biting, bordering on cruel. I began to feel awkward and
uneasy, as if I were a clueless guest at a wedding where family
tensions were palpable if inchoate.
After the initial exchange of pleasantries nobody said much to me or
seemed to care that I was there. Which was a relief.
The dinner plates were cleared; dessert came and went. There was no
interruption in the flow of wine. I did my best to keep up but I was
out of my league: I couldn't match their drinking
or their repartee. I needed air. I attempted to leave money but was
rebuffed with one collective voice. I woozily stood, made my
farewellsߞand spent the next several hours walking
along the canals.
Years went by. After losing my job in a downsizing at Sun I became
disenchanted with the Silicon Valley rat-race, and in the fall of 1997 I moved to a small island off the
coast of Maine. My last official act as a Sun employee was to convert
ten years' worth of stock options. I had never
married, and have no children: I was awash in money. What I needed was
something to do with my life.
It was at that time that I was approached, via e-mail, by the Hals
Contest Subcommittee of the Society for Analytical Engines. It seemed
that I had made some impression on the Amsterdam dinner party after
all. I must have mentioned that earlier in my career I had been a
technical writer. In fact, I had been recognized as a master of the
craft by the Society for Technical Communication, from whom I
received, in 1988, the coveted
Award of Distinguished Technical Communication. Now the committee
needed a disinterested technical communicator to edit and publish the
results of their inaugural artificial storyteller's
competition.
As originally conceived, the Hofstadter commemorative was to contain
two computer-written works of fiction: A novella called Bees, and a novel called The Bonehead Computer Museum. Along with them
was an introduction written by the contest committee that explained
the rules by which the winning entries had been judged. The Society
had decided to publish privately and needed someone to manage the
production. Did I want the job?
Remembering the odd tension of that subterranean dinner, my first
inclination was to say no. But I was intrigued and my vanity bested my
timidity. Two days after getting the offer I sent my acceptance.
Over the next several weeks and months the bytes arrived. I did
nothing but collect them. Sometimes a chapter came entire, sometimes
only a paragraph, or a sentenceߞa word! And then it
was done. The writing being complete, I undertook to edit. It was
child's play. I corrected some obvious grammatical
errorsߞfewer than a dozen, all
toldߞeliminated a few instances of redundancy when
they appeared to be the result of transmission glitches, and smoothed
some ruffled Postscript. I chose the typeface, page size and layout; I
made arrangements with a printer and arranged for a small private
printing. All told, hardly more than a week's work,
for which I was paid quite well. This work was completed in early
1997. That could have been the end of my involvement with this
project. It should have been.
But having read the work in question, I wasn't
happy with the plans for its publication. I had just edited an
extraordinary and historic document. The Technical Report of the Artificial Fiction
Subcommittee of the Society for Analytical Engines,
1993 contained two software-written novels which, while
certainly imperfect, were the most compelling evidence ever of a truly
human sensibility in a computer program. Moreover the Report also contained a scholarly introduction
to these artificial fictions that explained in very accessible terms
just how these programs achieved their magic. It just
didn't seem right to me that such a work should be
privately published. So I decided, without consulting the Committee,
to seek an established publisher.
A long coincidental chain led me to the New York City offices of
literary agent Joe Regal, who, despite reservations about the
authenticity of the work I wanted him to represent, took me on as a
client and set about finding a publisher for the manuscript.
Joe's first assignment to me was to come up with a
catchier title for the book. I proposed Cheap Complex Devices.
In deciding to take me on as a client, Joe was betting that the Technical Report I brought him could be
shaped into a book that would make money for his agency.
Paradoxically, money was not a consideration for me; my only concern
was to find a publisher with sufficient stature to secure for this
book the audience it warranted.
Alas, the publishing world failed to appreciate the significance of
the manuscript that Joe brought them and not a single offer was made.
So I was back to square one, and I prepared to publish the Technical Report myself as I had been hired to
do in the first place. It was then that I made a most horrific and
embarrassing discovery: I no longer had the source to one of the two
novels, namely, The Bonehead Computer
Museum. With this discovery I began my surreal stroll down a
nightmarish path to which I still see no end.
It began like this: one day while I was in the offices of Joe Regal,
literary agent, discussing strategies for publishing Cheap Complex Devices, my illegally parked
car was towed from 29th Street to the New York City impound lot by
the East River. That was embarrassing, but the remedy was easy enough:
I paid the ransom and retrieved the car. Oddly enough, the impound lot
clerk looked enough like me that he could have been my twin brother,
and we joshed about that as I paid the fine. Only later did I discover
that my laptop and a paper manuscript of The Bonehead Computer Museum had been stolen
from the trunk of my brand new BMW coupe.
It is horrible to admit, but it is the truth and cannot be escaped: I
had no backup. I had lost the only copies I had (paper and electronic)
to a full-length novel written entirely by a computer program. By good
fortune I had made copies of the remaining parts of the book. The
Committee that had hired me of course would have a copy of The Bonehead Computer Museum, but for weeks I
was too embarrassed to request one. Alas, my pride was to cost me
dearly.
I finally mustered the courage to write to the Committee to tell them
what had happened. But I never heard back from them. In fact, my
e-mail bounced, and my subsequent efforts to find them by web surfing
proved fruitless. I was baffled and disturbed by their vanishing act,
but mostly I was upset about the lost manuscript. I felt an obligation
to the book itself, and I dreamed
obsessively about how to restore its integrity so that I could publish
it.
And then things got really weird.
Twenty months or so after the manuscript to The Bonehead Computer Museumhad been stolen
from my car in the New York City Police impound lot, the book itself,
slightly revised, appeared for sale under a different title.
I first learned of this after reading a review on the geeky website
called Lashout. The purported
author of this book was passing himself off to the credulous masses as
some kind of Silicon Valley archetype, but I recognized him as the
now-retired New York City Police Department detective who bore a
strong physical resemblance to me.
The editorial changes made to The
Bonehead Computer Museum by this con artist (who had been
demoted, for some infraction unknown, to the position of impound lot
clerk) in every instance detracted from its overall quality. The chief
“improvement” that he made was to make
all the female characters gorgeous and irresistibly attracted to the
protagonist. He also introduced a lot of hackneyed cliches and typos
into what had been a clean manuscript.
Nevertheless the underlying novel was so good that not even his
amateurish ministrations could ruin it. The reviews were raves and the
sales were strong. He attained the stature of cult hero among the
savvy set. So this human burglar had successfully ripped off and
debased a superior work of computer-written fiction and ridden his
crime to minor fame. But that's not all he had
done.
The Bonehead Computer
Museum contained such a wealth of information about the workings
of computers, the computer industry, biochemistry and so forth that it
was hard to imagine a sidelined cop on a scutwork detail having
written it. To account for the discrepancy, this liar invented a
fictional persona that bore a striking resemblance to me. He gave this
fictional writer a name obscenely close to my own. This car-lot clerk
had been a detective, after all. He knew what he was doing, and ripped
off my soul just as convincingly as he had ripped off the purloined
novel.
Legal considerations unfortunately prevent me from naming the
perpetrator of this literary fraud or explicitly stating the title he
gave to his stolen and mangled thriller.
In the intervening years I have tried every way I can imagine to
reclaim The Bonehead Computer
Museum, to prove that its true author is a software construct.
But the time has come to admit defeat and publish that to which I hold
clear title. The gravely wounded book that you hold in your
hands, Cheap Complex Devices, here
published without its integral and deeply missed The Bonehead Computer Museum, includes the
manuscript precisely in the state it was in on the day my car was
towed away from 29th Street,
Manhattan, while I sat upstairs discussing with my friend and agent
Joe Regal just how to obtain respectability for this epochal literary
construction.
I cannot take credit for writing the words that follow; they speak for
themselves. But it was I who chose the title for the collection.
And I chose the epigrams.
John Compton Sundman
Stanhope Island, Maine
July, 2002
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