The Great Automatic Grammatizator
Roald Dahl, 1954
In Someone Like You, Penguin Books, 1970
Summary of the Story
Characters
There are two main characters in the story, with a few other people
getting the briefest of mentions. Mr John Bohlen is the boss of an
electrical engineering company, and Adolf Knipe is an employee of the
company. Their relationship is a civil but guarded one; Bohlen thinks
of Knipe as "a difficult boy", and Knipe's dislike for his boss
appears to grow during all the times that they are together. Knipe is
a frustrated author; he spends much of his spare time writing short
stories. He sends these for publication to the popular magazines of
the day, all without success, at the rate of about one every week.
This gives him a certain bias against the publishing trade, and
magazine editors in particular.
Plot
At the start of the story, the firm that the two main characters work
for has just built a `great automatic computing engine', which is seen
as a great breakthrough, and reported as such in the press; Mr Bohlen
reads from a laudatory newspaper article ("...For practical purposes,
there is no limit to what it can do...").
Given the great success of this project, and his dislike for his
employee, Mr Bohlen tells Knipe to have some time off "Take a week.
Two weeks if you like", and it is during this time that the main
technological advancement of the story takes place.
As soon as he gets home from the office, Knipe is struck with the
"delicious idea" of building a machine that can write short stories.
He realises "That English grammar is governed by rules that are almost
mathematical in their strictness". This leads him to believe in
the possibility of realising his idea.
The process of designing the machine which will write stories is
divided into two parts; creating the physical mechanism which will
carry out the job, and the study of the English language (and stories
written in it) which form the basis for the design of Knipe's
algorithm. At the end of his two weeks' solid work, the design of the
machine is complete; "on the fifteenth day of continuous work, he
collected the papers into two large folders which he carries -- almost
at a run -- to the offices of John Bohlen, Inc., electrical engineers".
After some persuasion, Mr Bohlen is convinced of the financial benefits
of the machine (Writers get paid "... anything up to twenty-five
hundred dollars" per story, "it probably averages around a thousand",
which works out at about forty thousand dollars in a year). Another
factor that convinces Mr Bohlen that he should accept Knipe's
proposition is fame "There isn't any reason why we shouldn't put
your name on some of the better stories". Story plots are
given to the machine by a human; this part of the process is not
(yet) automated.
After six months, the machine is built. The first story produced is
gibberish, and the machine is `de-bugged' in four days. This time,
the machine produces words but no punctuation or spaces
("Fewpeopleyetknowthata..."). This fault takes another few days to
fix, and then the machine starts to produce saleable stories. The
stories are sold through an agency which Knipe sets up. Of course,
none of the magazines which buy the stories know that they are
produced by a machine.
The next idea is to adapt the machine, so that it can produce novels
rather than short stories. "Within another couple of months", the
machine is complete. The process of writing a novel involves setting
the plot (which is now another part of the automated process) using
fifteen rows of switches controlling length, style, theme and so on
(the first row, for example, requires the choice of style for the
stories; Historical, Satirical, Philosophical, etc., etc.). In
addition, the `author' has many `organ-stop'-style switches that he or
she adjusts during the actual production of the story to introduce and
control humour, mystery, tension, and so on. There are two foot pedal
that control "the most important ingredient of all"; passion.
The first story is produced by My Bohlen; he panics and presses both
feet firmly down on the pedals; this produces a book that is "a bit
fruity". Another attempt at a novel is needed; the machine is so
complicated to use that "the writing of a novel by the Knipe method
was going to be rather like flying a plane and driving a car and
playing the organ all at the same time". Mr Bohlen's second novel is
a success; "within a week, the manuscript had been read and accepted
by an enthusiastic publisher".
Now Knipe begins to want more. He sets out to buy the names of
several authors "Exactly like Rockefeller did with his oil companies"
in order to absorb the competition. He offers a writer a fixed annual
income for life for the sole use of their name. Some writers resist,
but when Knipe begins to concentrate solely on the mediocre writers
(the first of whom "saw the machine-made stuff was better than her
own"), he persuades many of them to sign up. In "the first full year
of the machine's operation ... at least one half of all the novels and
stories published in the English language were produced by Adolf Knipe
upon the Great Automatic Grammatizator". At the very end of the
story, the author is revealed to be one of the few who "hesitate to
sign their names", with nine hungry children and precious little
income. He pleads, in the closing sentence of the story; "Give us
strength, Oh Lord, to let our children starve".
The Relevance to Computer Science
If we consider the Great Automatic Grammatizator as a natural-language
generating machine, and therefore as a form of computing device, we
can view Dahl's story as a type of science-fiction, and examine how he
views both the technology and the people involved with it.
The Image of the (Computer) Scientist
Adolf Knipe is the prototypical computer scientist. He very much fits
in with the stereotypical view of a very hard-working male, who spends
all of his time (e.g., the two week holiday that he was given at the
start of the story) with his work. He is the type of person who can
easily master complexity, which is seen in his lack of worry about the
difficulty of controlling the machine.
The Nature of Machines
The machines which are built are single purpose; they can only carry
out one task, and therefore are very different from today's computers.
"Programming" a machine involves re-building it from its hardware
components. The machines are purely mechanical, apart from their
memories, which are (the now very old-fashioned) mercury columns,
which is no surprise, as Dahl was writing in 1954, long before today's
electronic devices. The user has little interaction with the machine;
he or she cannot see the results of the controls on the output until
the story is written; there is no concept of the user interacting via
some form of display (all output is produced on "a strange electric
typewriter that could type ten thousand words per minute"). Again,
this type of advance was many years in the future at the time the
story was written.
The Capability of Machines
One of the problems of natural-language engineering was solved in this
book with a two week design process and six months' "implementation".
Generating English text is actually a very hard problem at the moment.
Knipe effectively takes Chomsky's approach to grammar, by formulating
mathematical rules of language. The LNLE at Durham have been working
on a usable grammar of English for ten years, without the success that
John Bohlen, Inc. had within a year of conception of the idea!
The Design Process
The approach taken by Knipe in the building of his machine was to
design it all in one go, and then "implement" it (in hardware). This
was then followed by very simple testing, which resulted in quick
"debugging" of the hardware.
Automation Replacing Human Work
Throughout this century, and before, machines of one form or another
have been replacing human labour. This was one of the ideas that
would have inspired Dahl in his writing.
Conclusions
Dahl obviously could not have predicted the future, and it was
probably not his aim with this story. He did, however, predict work
on natural-language engineering, which has been a large field of study
throughout the history of computer science. The story takes a very
optimistic view of the process of machine-writing; Dahl (as an author
himself), must have known how non-mechanical writing actually is.
The distinction between the engineers of a machine and its users was
unclear; the machines' primary user is their inventor, Bohlen uses
them occasionally, and we do see one "real" novelist being allowed to
use it under Knipe's supervision, though only once.
The concept of computer science as a field of study separate from
electrical engineering is far from Dahl's mind; he does not draw the
distinction between purely mechanical processes and knowledge- or
information-based processes, which are the concern of the computer
scientist today.