We asked a newswriting robot to write Marvin Minsky's obit, and it's pretty good

The pioneering artificial intelligence theorist Marvin Minsky died Sunday. So we thought it would be appropriate to ask for an obituary from one of his virtual descendants: Wordsmith, the automated news-writing bot from the company Automated Insights. It takes structured data--stuff that fits into a spreadsheet--and fits it into templates of increasing complexity. But Minsky was always interested in the differences and similarities between human and machine cognition, and arguably Wordsmith is cogitating every bit as hard as human reporters do on deadline. "You can start with things like their name, their age, the day the died, how they died. You can imagine in a spreadsheet, 'significant accomplishments 1, 2, and 3.'" So in this case, the template is a one-off rather than fully automated, and the data was harder to scrape.