14 Jun 2012
Progress on the Summary Generator
For the past few weeks I’ve been working on an app that can automatically generate random summaries for Tom Swift books. There’s still quite a bit of work to do, but it’s coming along:
The summaries have three parts: the beginning, middle, and end. Right now I’ve almost completed all of the templates for the beginning section. I don’t have any for the middle, and I only have one template for the end (which is what you see in the screenshot above).
Last year I tried to make a plot generator, and it failed pretty hard. I’ve learned from that and I have to say that the Tom Swift summary generator is pretty sophisticated; I think it has an excellent chance of working. What I’ve got so far is looking pretty good. The key is to avoid throwing random things together, and to be very intelligent about the word choices you make. (You also have to know what invention was randomly selected, because the summary has to talk about it.)
I’ve probably got at least several more weeks of work to do before I’m ready to release this. But it is coming along! Once it’s done it shouldn’t be too hard to adapt it to creating other types of summaries, although that won’t be my next project.