Can Algorithms Be Authors? One May Be Coming to Your Pocket Soon

Computers are poised to literally write the next chapter in third world literacy. So says Philip Parker, who with his friend (and framework), EVE, are looking to change the world – and the world of authorship, as we know it… and the technology could be coming to your pocket soon.

There is a serious problem that third world countries are facing as they struggle to advance their societies into the modern technological era, says Parker, the Chair Professor of Management Science at INSTEAD (aka The European Institute of Business Administration) in France. Writing text books using “small market” languages isn’t a particularly profitable endeavor. Thus, math books, reading books, spelling books – or just books for the joy of reading aren’t readily available.

“It’s just a classic case of market failure,” laments Parker, noting that the demand is there, however narrow that demand is. “Authors are expensive,” he says, “they want food, and things like that – they want income – and there’s also the editors, and the graphic artists and all these people.”

Parker set out asking if there was a way to solve this market failure problem, applying his background in Management Science, a discipline founded by Frederick Taylor, that aims to solve basic business problems through the use of mathematics. This question, says Parker, led him to the question of whether authors can be replaced with computer algorithms.

Meet EVE. Otherwise known as Economically Viable Entity (a name which the algorithm gave to itself), EVE is an authoring engine comprised of a collection of many programs, including pattern matching, machine learning, training programs, meta analyses, graph theory, authoring programs and optimization routines (A FAQ with a lot more details on EVE can be found here).

In the search to answer the question on how to address under-served markets for literacy, EVE was created with a business purpose in mind: to sell very expensive, high-end market research studies, completely computer generated, in order to subsidize the creation of language learning materials for the third world.

Parker says that together, he and EVE have been publishing for about ten years, having successfully published millions of titles. “Most of them are high-end industry studies, but a lot of them are language learning,” he says.

One of the key challenges, says Parker, is finding genres of human authoring that is very formulaic. “If it’s formulaic, then perhaps mathematical algorithms can imitate what human authors would do had they had the opportunity to publish in those under-served areas.”

As an AI bot, Parker says that EVE is different from other AI bots who have been created to pass the Turing test in that EVE is not designed to act like a human. Rather, Parker says EVE is a “creative knowledge bot” that is able to create new knowledge using statistical programs and graph theory. Eve was designed to perform tasks that humans can’t do, such as learn over 200 languages, or write didactic poems for every word in the dictionary.

To that end, Parker says that EVE has read the equivalent of over 100,000 books, including all of Wikipedia, the Gutenberg project, numerous websites, dictionaries, and international archives. And while writing books is one thing EVE can do, it can also create PC games, software programs, web sites and video.

According to Parker, the technology isn’t that far from general use. “The future will be in your pocket,” he teased. “Your phones should be writing books for you pretty soon – they’ll be writing PhD dissertations, talk about formulaic!”

While details on how soon EVE will be available to the general public are not forthcoming, the momentum already behind the EVE framework is impressive.

Anyone who is interested in interacting with EVE can do through an online dictionary that is powered by the bot here. Type in a word (I used the word “egregious”), and EVE will get to work on everything from definitions, etymology, common expressions, a timeline of the word’s use going back to the dark ages, and more.

Phillip Parker’s TedX talk on EVE can be viewed here:

Related Items:

Can Google Harness Big Data to Ward Off Death?

Rice University Deploying BOLD Optical Network Strategy for Big Data Processing 

Data Science Back to School