We evaluate a range of recent LLMs on English creative writing, a challenging and complex task that requires imagination, coherence, and style. We use a difficult, open-ended scenario chosen to avoid training data reuse: an epic narration of a single combat between Ignatius J. Reilly, the protagonist of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), and a pterodactyl, a prehistoric flying reptile. We ask several LLMs and humans to write such a story and conduct a human evalution involving various criteria such as fluency, coherence, originality, humor, and style. Our results show that some state-of-the-art commercial LLMs match or slightly outperform our writers in most dimensions; whereas open-source LLMs lag behind. Humans retain an edge in creativity, while humor shows a binary divide between LLMs that can handle it comparably to humans and those that fail at it. We discuss the implications and limitations of our study and suggest directions for future research.

Ethiopia's 13-month war has seen yet another dramatic turn as the federal government's counteroffensive against fighters from the northern Tigray region has made substantial advances, reversing the spectacular gains made recently by the Tigrayan forces in their push southwards. State media said this week the country's "joint gallant security forces" had retaken the strategic towns of Dessie and Kombolcha, the latest in a series of battleground victories since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said last month he would head to the front line and urged Ethiopians to join the fight. As fighting drags on, the government, with its tiny air force of 22 combat-capable aircraft, seems to have also realised that air power and timely intelligence can make all the difference in a conflict – especially one fought over vast and often mountainous areas like in Ethiopia's north. Although there has been no official confirmation, analysts have pointed to credible reports saying Ahmed's government has reached out in recent months to manufacturers of cheap and efficient armed drones hoping that air power will turn the tide in its way. Photographic evidence has pointed to the presence of Chinese Wing Loong 2 Unarmed Aerial Vehicles or UAVs at Ethiopian military bases, while a Bellingcat investigation in August found strong indications that Iranian armed drones, along with their ground control stations, had been spotted at Semera Airport.

In 2011, Don Moyer, a retired graphic designer, inherited a Blue Willow plate from his grandmother. Washington, and draws every day. "I got this plate and I was studying it, and I really kind of liked it," he said. "The design was very busy, like doodling--no place was at rest." At the end, for no particular reason, he added a small pterodactyl.

A breakthrough discovery shows that pterodactyls could fly from birth, something no other species before or since has been able to do. And British scientists said that the revelation has a'profound impact' on our understanding of the reptiles. The common belief was the pterodactyls, like birds and bats, only took to the air once they were fully grown. A new study shows pterodactyls could fly from birth, something no other species before or since can do. The findings have a'profound impact' on our understanding of reptiles Pterodactyls used both their arms and legs to push themselves off the ground during take-off, in a manoeuvre known as the'quadrupedal launch'. They were almost as tall as a giraffe with wing spans of around 32ft (10 metres).

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Most computational models of analogy assume they are given a delineated source domain and often a specified target domain. These systems do not address how analogs can be isolated from large domains and spontaneously retrieved from long-term memory, a process we call spontaneous analogy. We present a system that represents relational structures as feature bags. Using this representation, our system leverages perceptual algorithms to automatically create an ontology of relational structures and to efficiently retrieve analogs for new relational structures from long-term memory. We provide a demonstration of our approach that takes a set of unsegmented stories, constructs an ontology of analogical schemas (corresponding to plot devices), and uses this ontology to efficiently find analogs within new stories, yielding significant time-savings over linear analog retrieval at a small accuracy cost.