Minstrel Remixed Online

Current Version: Skald 1.0.2
Downloads And Changelog: Here

About Minstrel Remixed

Minstrel Remixed is a story generation system that is designed to simulate a human author through the entire writing process. Additionally, it has a problem solving module which uses what it knows about the world (which it learns by reading other stories,)

Without going into too many specifics, Minstrel starts working with a story that is mostly empty which it generates from a template. After that, it fills in pieces of that template as it thinks best. The problem solving module is what is primarily used to create details for the emerging story, adapting information from other stories for use in the current one. Occassionally the system will decide that more drama is needed, a backstory for some person or object would be beneficial, or that the story needs to be enhanced in some other fashion. When this happens, Minstrel Remixed will add new pieces onto the story outside of the bounds of the original template.

Under the hood, Minstrel is designed to be friendly to developers and academics aiming to work with it. It can generate X stories autonomously on demand and spit them out in XML format or work with a user to interactively craft an individual story. Additionally there are numerous virtual knobs and dials that can be adjusted to alter which algorithms are used and the state of all the variables.

What's with this Remix Thing?

Back in 1993 Scott Turner finished his work on Minstrel. He did some analyses, got his Ph.D., published a book, and then decided the project was successfully complete. While he found a job and went to use the shiney new degree, academics in the story-generation field were lauding his project as a high water mark in their field. Unfortunately for everyone, Minstrel was written on what are now antique computers and saved on media that is extremely troublesome to get a reader for. As a result, Minstrel has remained an untested icon of what story-generation systems can do for nearly two decades. Minstrel Remixed is a reconstruction of this original landmark system using a modern programming language (Scala) and released online for anyone to work with.