Writing basic stats from a sporting event or the latest stock prices can be a tedious assignment for journalists. "Neothetics Inc. (NEOT) on Thursday reported a loss of $6.9 million in its first quarter. The San Diego-based company said it had a loss of 50 cents per share. Neothetics shares have decreased 16 percent since the beginning of the year." This is important information for someone with stock in the pharmaceutical company Neothetics, but not very useful to a mass audience. These basic stories can become a waste of time and resources for news outlets, especially a wire service such as the Associated Press.

You wouldn't know it, but over the last few years, computers have increasingly (and quietly) written many of the sporting news, financial reporting, and weather forecasts you already read daily. Example 1: "The University of Michigan baseball team used a four-run fifth inning to salvage the final game in its three-game weekend series with Iowa, winning 7-5 on Saturday afternoon (April 24) at the Wilpon Baseball Complex, home of historic Ray Fisher Stadium." Example 2: "Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday." The technology works like this. Rules for data are paired with pre-canned words and phrases to say different things.If you guessed that the more emotional language of the second example was human, you guessed wrong, according to the New York Times.

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.