A Phone That Cures Your Flu: Generating Imaginary Gadgets in Fictions with Planning and Analogies

Since early days of Artificial Intelligence (AI), one of the We present a computational approach for creating new goals has been to procedurally simulate the human ability types of magical and science fiction objects by of storytelling. Many story generation systems (Meehan extrapolating and combining existing object types. The 1981; Lebowitz 1985; Turner 1992; Pérez y Pérez and approach described here augments the creativity of planbased Sharples 2001; Cavazza, Charles, and Mead 2002; Riedl story generators such as that by Riedl and Young and Young 2010; Gervás et al. 2005) begin with a (2006). We empower a traditional story planner with the predefined world configuration. Such configurations ability to plan with analogies. We incrementally modify include unchangeable facts about the fictional world such behaviors of known objects based on a consistent set of as what objects exist, how they relate to each other and analogies with backward chaining and combine behaviors what events can happen. With the initial world of multiple objects to create a new behavior. The process configuration, story generators build stories, the execution results in a new gadget that can cause desired changes in of which transform and evolve the world. As most story the fictional world that are impossible or improbable to generators accept the initial world as a given rather than achieve by other means.