Reviews of the 2018 entrants — Last year’s Interactive Fiction Competition had the largest number of entrants ever, and with nearly 80 games and stories most people had no hope of playing them all. …

My favorites from 2017 — Every November, a hundred or so people write computer programs that attempt to generate “novels.” NaNoGenMo is a tongue-in-cheek competition that, like its inspiration, National Novel Writing Month, has no prizes or rankings. …

Some asides about asides — For this year’s annual Interactive Fiction Competition, I entered a hypertext story called Harmonia. (It came in third place, hooray.) The story, in part, pertains to the ways in which narratives are re-read and re-interpreted over time, as expressed by annotations and scholarly commentary. I’ve always been fascinated by the…

Part 3: Generation and task learning — (This is a continuation of “What artificial intelligence can do today: Prediction, classification, and regression,” and is part of a longer series on AI Literacy.) Generation When we talk about “training a network,” often what we’re really saying is that we’re teaching the machine about probabilities: If an image is mostly…

Part 2: Better data science with prediction, classification, and regression — In the first post in this series on artificial intelligence aimed at a non-technical audience, I provided definitions for the major AI buzzwords: machine learning, neural networks, and deep learning. Given the fundamental principles of modern AI — that ML systems learn from lots of examples, and that deep learning…

Simple answers to common questions about AI and machine learning (part 1 of a series) — Though I’ve been following machine learning for a long time, only recently have I tried to become a practitioner. Last year I threw myself into learning the fundamentals of natural language processing, and wrote a five-part series on NLP aimed at other programmers. …

Adapted from Playful Generative Art: Computer-Mediated Creativity and Ephemeral Expressions, presented at Simon Fraser University in February 2017 Any technology as powerful as artificial intelligence provokes ethical questions. Does AI make killing by remote control too consequence-free? Do AI models systematize existing biases? Are we coding ourselves out of jobs? …

2016 edition — When I first started as an independent ebook consultant, I went to big publishing conferences like Book Expo America to try to drum up work. I had no clients and no contacts, which meant I had a lot of time to wander around feeling like a failure and consoling myself…

World models: Applying order to the procedural universe — NLP is deeply concerned with language models: systems that attempt to represent human language through statistical relationships and/or formal logical grammars. Language models usually don’t attempt to represent semantics or otherwise relate language to the real world. …