Usapyon In A Poorly-Designed Universe
Cast:
Cure Mint, Akimoto Komachi - age 20
Kiryuu Kaoru - age 19
January, 2012
"I'm sorry to trouble you with this. I know that you're busy."
"It's fine," Komachi replies. "Proofreading others' writing should help me to be more critical of my own."
Kaoru leans back in her seat and stretches. "I don't see why a computer science degree requires a creative writing class. I wish I could just write a program to do it for me."
"Isn't that basically your specialty?"
"If it were easy to get a computer to write a story, there wouldn't be much need for authors. A computer can be relied on to do exactly as you tell it, which I really like about them, but in exchange, you have to tell it exactly what you want without leaving anything out. You can tell it to erase itself completely with just eight characters, but writing even simple sentences is the kind of project that whole teams get research grants for."
"Maybe that's why they want you to take a writing class."
"Maybe," Kaoru admits. "Actually, this is my second time in the class. Last term, I got too deep into writing a program to make the creative part easier. I ended up failing the class."
"Did your program work?"
"It did what I told it to, but that isn't the same thing. I had the idea that if I set all my stories for the class in one continuity, and told the computer to randomly generate events to fill in the gaps, then I'd have a more or less complete outline that would only need the human touch. So I gave it a list of characters and their ages, and had it generate events for every year."
"That sounds pretty useful, actually. Like having a database that doesn't tell you what has happened, but what should happen next."
"Sounds simple, doesn't it? But a computer only does what you tell it to. It doesn't know or care what plans you might have for the characters, or what should happen in a story anyone would want to read. Suppose your stories are set a few years apart. People die every year, and while people who are old or have other problems are more likely to die, an accident can happen to anyone. So you tell the program to roll a die with ten-thousand sides for each character, and if they roll a one, they die. That's not a very good model, so you change it. Now instead of a one, they die if they roll under their age, and because old people are much more likely to die in a given time frame, you have them roll the same die repeatedly.
"This is not a winning strategy for a number of reasons, but it's easy to program. So, as your human touch, you write a story about a cute girl named Usapyon who likes strawberries and baking, and how she gets on with her friends, parents, grandparents, a cute boy she might marry in the future, and so on. That's a human-like story, isn't it? After that, you figure you'll advance the scenario a few years and see how she's doing, so you hand the lot of them off to the program and see who dies.
"Usapyon immediately rolls a one. There goes your central character and all of her future plans for her. No sign that this was coming at all, but you're bound to the results. The story doesn't make any sense, but accidents do happen. So you throw out the whole story, and write a new program with more complicated instructions to try and keep that exact thing from being a problem again."
"Couldn't you just go back to earlier in your story and add some foreshadowing? The readers won't react so badly to Usapyon dying if you hint at the possibility beforehand."
"You'd think so, but no. If you do that, then you, the author, have a time machine, and you're trapped in your own story where the governments of the world want you dead and your very survival is decided by a die roll every year."
Komachi giggles. "Do you mind if I write that story? I think it could be fun."