ACM TechNews

He Wrote 200,000 Books (But Computers Did Some of the Work)

New York Times (04/14/08) P. C1; Cohen, Noam

Insead professor Philip M. Parker has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject and, with the help of 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, combine the results into books in a variety of genres, printing them only when a customer buys one. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books using his technique, making him "the most published author in the history of the planet," he says. Parker says medical libraries collect nearly everything he produces. He has expanded the technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry, and scripts for animated game shows. Parker admits that his books are essentially worthless to someone who is good at using the Internet, but that there are people who are not Internet savvy who find the books useful. Artificial intelligence researchers say computers are far from being able to substitute for what the general public would consider authors. Rutgers computer science professor Chung-chieh Shan says being able to write a text with the variety one would expect from a typical human English speaker is actually the holy grail of computer linguistics, and Parker's program falls somewhere between there and a more simple program capable of automatically writing a telephone directory.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html

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