Now in its third year, National Novel Generation Month is a whimsical offshoot of the wildly popular National Novel Writing Month. NaNoGenMo participants write a computer program that outputs a “novel” of at least 50,000 words. (There is no official definition of “novel”—any 50,000 words qualify.) The Verge had a good roundup of the 2014 entries.

Last year, I wrote a program that generated a nonsense book inspired by the mysterious 16th century Voynich Manuscript. This year I took inspiration from one of the earliest known works of computer-generated fiction, the little-known SAGA II.

SAGA II was written in 1960 by Douglas T. Ross and Harrison R. Morse at MIT, and was featured in The Thinking Machine, a delightful 1961 CBS television special. In the special (which can be viewed in its entirety online), men in suits sit in comfortable chairs smoking pipes and debating whether computers can be truly creative. What sets the show apart from other examples of breathless futurism is the emphasis on contemporary research—we see actual engineers manipulating room-size computers, light pens, and teletypes.

The SAGA II project was commissioned by the show’s CBS producer, who hypothesized that TV westerns were so stereotyped that a computer could plausibly write a screenplay. In response, the MIT engineers coded a simulation that could generate an infinite number of variations on a classic Western scene: a robber, pursued by a sheriff, breaks into a house, has a few drinks, and engages in a deadly shoot-out. The survivor takes the loot and leaves the scene. CBS filmed two of the computer-generated scripts and, charmingly, one buggy one in which the robber gets stuck in an endless loop, perhaps the earliest form of glitch art.

Here’s what an original script looked like:

(The gun is in the right hand; the money is in the left hand; the glass is on the table; the bottle is on the table; the holster is on the robber; the sheriff’s gun is in the sheriff’s right hand; the sheriff’s holster is on the sheriff.)

ROBBER: (The robber is at the window.) Go to door; open door; go thru door; close door; go to corner; put money down at corner; go to window; put gun down at window; lean on window and look; lean on window and look; go to corner; count money; go to table; pick up glass with right hand (empty); take glass from right hand with left hand; pick up bottle with right hand; pour; put bottle on table; take glass from left hand with right hand; take a drink from glass; put glass on table; pick up bottle with right hand; pour; go to corner; put bottle down at corner; go to window; pick up gun with right hand; check gun; put gun in holster; go to table; pick up glass with right hand; take a drink from glass; go to window; put glass down at window.

SHERIFF: (The sheriff is at the window.) See robber; (robber sees sheriff); go to door.

ROBBER: Take gun from holster with right hand; check gun; go to door; check gun; put gun down at door.

SHERIFF: Open door; see robber; (robber sees sheriff); go thru door; go to window.

ROBBER: Pick up gun with right hand.

SHERIFF: Go to table.

ROBBER: Aim; fire; MISSED; aim; fire; SHERIFF HIT; blow out barrel; put gun in holster.

SHERIFF: Drop gun; sheriff dies.

ROBBER: Go to corner; pick up money with right hand; go to door; go thru door; close door. CURTAIN.

The remake

The source code for SAGA II is long gone, but enough artifacts remained that I felt confident I could write a reasonable fascimile. I had three primary sources:

1. The Thinking Machine special itself, which includes logical storyboards from the project.
2. An original 1960 memo describing the technical implementation of the switching and branching system.
3. Safari! To my delight, the best reference turned out to be Donald Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, which includes two example scripts: sheriff wins and robber wins. I was able to infer a lot about the world model from these transcripts.

I chose to write my implementation in modern Python rather than imitating the original’s global variables and weighted probabilities. That said, I still had to write a lot of code; there’s a surprising amount of hidden logic in the original, including objects which can contain or support other objects, a model of handedness, and the quantity of whisky and bullets remaining in the actors’ inventory. In the end I arrived at a weird hybrid of interactive fiction, role-playing games (each ‘actor’ rolls for initiative based on their current state), an event queue, and the kind of object-oriented code you normally only write in computer science class (“a Robber is a type of Person that is a type of Thing”). And since I had to satisfy the one rule of NaNoGenMo, I made the program generate 350 unique scenes for a total of 53,392 words.

The most important code in the simulation: shooting.

def shoot(self, target, aimed=False):
        """Shoot first, ask questions never"""
        gun = self.get_if_held(Gun)
        if gun:
            # Usually we'll aim and then fire, sometimes we'll just fire
            if not aimed:
                if random.randint(0, 5) > 1:
                    print("aim")
                    self.queue.append((self.shoot, target, True))
                    return False
            print("fire")
            log.debug("%s is trying to shoot %s", self.name, target.name)

            # Establish any weighting factors based on the type of person that affects
            # their accuracy (e.g. the Robber is more accurate when he's drunk)
            hit_weight = self.starting_hit_weight()

            # As in the original, the actors get inexplicably more accurate if they're on their 
            # last bullet
            if gun.num_bullets == 1:
                hit_weight += 1

            # Also defying common sense, they get more accurate if they're injured
            if self.health < DEFAULT_HEALTH:
                hit_weight += 1

            weighted_hit_or_miss = [('miss', 3), ('nick', 3 * hit_weight), ('hit', 1 * hit_weight)]
            hit_or_nick = random.choice([val for val, cnt in weighted_hit_or_miss for i in range(cnt)])
            # Print the relevant 'HIT' or 'MISS' message based on the outcome...
            print(GUN_DAMAGE[hit_or_nick]['message'].format(target.name))

            # ...and update the target's health based on that outcome
            target.health += GUN_DAMAGE[hit_or_nick]['health']
            gun.num_bullets -= 1
            return True

(I asked my husband to proofread this post and he noted that the code never checks if there are bullets remaining. PATCHES WELCOME.)

Example teleplay

The gun is in the robber’s right hand. The money is in the robber’s
left hand. The holster is on the robber. The sheriff’s gun is in the
sheriff’s right hand. The sheriff’s holster is on the sheriff. The
glass is on the table. The bottle is on the table.

ROBBER:  (The robber is at the window.) Open door; go through door;
close door; go to corner; put money on corner; go to table; go to
window; check gun; go to corner; go to table; pick up the glass with
the robber’s left hand; go to window; go to corner; count money

SHERIFF: Go to window; open door; go through door

ROBBER: Fire; sheriff NICKED

SHERIFF: Close door; aim

ROBBER: Fire; MISSED

SHERIFF: Fire; MISSED

ROBBER: Fire; sheriff NICKED

SHERIFF: Aim; fire; robber NICKED

ROBBER: Aim; fire; sheriff HIT; aim; fire; sheriff NICKED

SHERIFF: Sheriff dies.

ROBBER: Blow out barrel; put gun in holster; pick up the money with the
robber’s right hand; go to table; open door; go through door; close
door

CURTAIN

Source code and complete NaNoGenMo “novel” are on Github.

For fun I also tried a variant where I spawned dozens of robbers and sheriffs who all wanted to kill each other:

GREEN ROBBER: close door; go to corner

NAVY ROBBER: aim

OCHRE SHERIFF: close door

NAVY ROBBER: fire; MISSED; fire; navy sheriff NICKED; aim

NAVY SHERIFF: close door; aim

GREEN SHERIFF: close door

RED ROBBER: aim

GRAY ROBBER: aim

NAVY ROBBER: fire; navy sheriff NICKED; navy sheriff HIT

NAVY SHERIFF: navy sheriff dies.

…but I think to make more compelling I’d need to introduce some interactions that weren’t present in the original.

Write your own program to write its own novel

National Novel Generation Month runs through the end of November (but since it’s not a real contest anyway, anyone can participate any time). Inspiration can be found in the list of projects that are completed or in-progress for 2015.

Donald Trump’s interview about technology on breitbart.com is uncharacteristically equivocal; he sounds like any other politician. Apparently, his batshit candor is limited to tweets, debates, and speeches. Memo to Trump-haters and opponents: technology is his weak spot. Breitbart Tech’s Milo Yiannopolous interviewed Trump about tech issues from the NSA to artificial intelligence. Full of equivocation and hedges, Trump’s … Continue reading Cyber-rattling from a weak, equivocal, and ignorant Donald Trump →

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Last night at the Martha Washington Hotel, Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group hosted its first "Hospitality Included" town hall, a meeting intended to explain the company's decision to eliminate tipping ("Hospitality Included" is the company's name for the new policy), answer questions, and address concerns from the public. The event featured a panel of four USHG members: Meyer, the Modern executive chef Abram Bissell (whose restaurant will be the first to adopt the new policy), chief cultural officer Erin Moran, and chief restaurant officer Sabato Sagaria. It’s been less than three weeks since the world learned of the shift, and given the scope and influence of Meyer’s restaurant group, it’s one of the bigger dining stories of the year. Here are five takeaways from last night’s question-and-answer session:

1. The policy's effects are already being felt at the Modern. The policy change won’t take place until later this month, and even then, it will be on a two-month trial period. But cooks are responding. According to Bissell, the kitchen was “in a crisis” about three months ago because it was short 12 cooks. They were getting just two to three applications per month, but since the announcement, he says, that number has jumped to two or three applications a day.

2. Meyer says wage inequality between cook and front-of-house staffers is worse than ever. Things have gotten so bad, Meyer says, that, “for the first time in my entire career, we have a restaurant, North End Grill, that has more Culinary Institute of America graduates working in the dining room than in the kitchen.” The reason why is simple: If you love restaurants, Meyer says, “but the only way you can afford to live in this city is to serve food rather than cook, you don’t have the luxury of making a choice.”

3. Customers' overall check averages will have to rise to offset added expenses.
As one audience member pointed out, customers' final bills are expected to be 5 to 8 percent higher than they are now. One audience member pointed out that inflation is flat, so customers will just be paying more money for the same meal. As Sagaria explained, this is because the amount left for a tip isn't taxed, but the additional revenue from the Hospitality Included model will be, so the added cost will cover that expense.

4. Without tips, how will customers be able to indicate how happy they are with the service? “The same way you give feedback if we overcook your salmon,” Meyer says, who outright dismissed the idea, and the effectiveness, of tipping as "punishment" for poor service. When prices include service and hospitality, he says, “our job is to make it right” — or take that item off the bill. In addition to that, Meyer, who bills Hospitality Included as a merit-based system, has talked about implementing a user-feedback rating system that, he argues, will allow USHG to “get much better data from you than we ever got or get with respect to your tips.”

5. Raising cooks' wages is the only way to ensure great restaurants will survive. With Shake Shack, Meyer may have created the fast-casual chain that chefs around the world want to emulate, but, he says, “I don’t want that to be the only way I can go out to dine in New York City, as a consumer or restaurateur.” In his eyes, this move is necessary to maintain a strong workforce in the kitchen. Otherwise, wage inequity “is going to completely dry up the influx of the kind of culinary talent we need to run great restaurants.”

Read more posts by Chris Crowley

Filed Under: explanations, danny meyer, new york city, news, takeaways, tipping, union square hospitality group

On Friday, the House of Representatives passed a budget reconciliation bill repealing key segments of Obamacare and prohibiting the payment of any federal funds to Planned Parenthood. The primary purpose of this bill is to set up a confrontation with President Obama. This bill next moves to the Senate, where several of its key provisions will likely be killed by the Byrd Rule.

1) What is budget reconciliation?

The 1974 Budget Act (as updated) requires* Congress to come up with a spending plan, or "budget resolution," every year. A budget resolution might instruct multiple House and Senate policy committees to report bills to reconcile current law with the budget plan. A budget reconciliation bill bundles these statutory changes together.

The critical feature of budget reconciliation bills for this post is that they cannot be filibustered in the Senate. So if the Senate majority party has a tax or spending proposal it really wants to pass, the budget reconciliation process may be its best option.

2) What if the Senate majority really wants to pass something that doesn't affect the budget? Can it use the budget reconciliation process?

This brings us to the Byrd Rule. The Byrd Rule is a section of the budget law that prevents non-budgetary policy proposals from being slipped into a "budget" bill or offered as an amendment on the Senate floor. Any senator can raise a point of order against a provision or amendment that violates the Byrd Rule, and it takes 60 votes to waive the Byrd Rule.

In simpler terms: The Byrd Rule prevents senators from trying to get their favorite policies past the 60-vote threshold they would normally need to get past a filibuster.

3) How does the Byrd Rule affect the Republican bill?

A quick read of the House bill (H.R. 3762) suggests that at least two sections are vulnerable:

1. A repeal of an Obamacare mandate that employers provide health insurance for their employees. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this provision will increase the number of uninsured by 675,000 and lead to higher tax revenues, assuming that employers pay higher wages instead of providing health care insurance.
2. A provision defunding Planned Parenthood. Republicans could get past the Byrd Rule if they simply banned any spending on women's health, but that would be political suicide. But if the GOP proposal is to spend the same funds using different health care providers, that's policy-related, not budgetary. Dinged.

Notably, the CBO estimate makes clear that the House bill recently dropped a provision to eliminate the Independent Payment Advisory Board, which the Senate parliamentarian had already singled out as vulnerable to the Byrd Rule. The CBO report states that this provision would not affect the budget until 2022, at which point eliminating the IPAD means forgoing the $7.1 billion it would save from 2022 to 2025.

4) Oh, that makes me so mad/glad! Why does the Byrd rule exist?

The 1974 budget process was only intended to provide an end run around the Senate filibuster for essential budget policy decisions. Senators never intended to create the loophole that ate the rule.

But as this Congressional Research Service report points out, Senate committees soon began including extraneous policy provisions in their "budget" legislation. This came to a head in 1985, when the Senate, led by then-Minority Leader Robert Byrd (D-WV), amended the budget process to apply the restrictions applied above. Byrd's amendment was adopted 96-0.** The rationale for the rule, both then and now, was 1) to protect reconciliation bills from being bogged down by controversial policy riders, and 2) to protect the Senate filibuster.

5) Wait, senators deliberately protected filibustering?

Unanimously. The "budget reconciliation" loophole could have been used to exempt the majority party's agenda from obstruction by declaring each part of the agenda a "reconciliation" bill. Realizing this, senators plugged the leak ASAP.

The broader point is that the filibuster has persisted in the Senate to this point because, at some level, senators know they can get rid of it and choose not to do so. The filibuster is not an accident of history; it is a choice.

6) Can Senate Republicans save the bill by firing the Senate parliamentarian?

As suggested by Ted Cruz? It is true that the parliamentarian makes initial recommendations regarding the application of the Byrd Rule, and can be fired. But the parliamentarian's role is to provide advice to the Senate's presiding officer: Joe Biden. Like most modern vice presidents, Biden does not act as the Senate's traffic cop on a daily basis, but on critical days — say, consideration of a budget reconciliation bill — he could show up and issue critical rulings on the application of the Byrd Rule, disregarding a newly installed and 100 percent Republican party-hack parliamentarian as he sees fit. It is not clear that firing the parliamentarian would solve the Republicans' problem.

7) Can Senate Republicans just repeal the Byrd Rule?

No. The Byrd Rule is part of a law, not the rules of the Senate. If the Republicans wanted to "go nuclear," they could bring up their policy items as a separate bill and then use a "nuclear option" approach to impose majority cloture on legislation ... but that seems unlikely.

8) How will I be affected if the Republicans win (or lose)?

In the short run, not at all. This is the most fascinating part to me: The Republicans know this bill will never become law. It will be vetoed, and the veto will be sustained. This fight is really about exactly which provisions are in the bill when it fails.

Behind this windmill tilting is an illuminating view of the goals of current Republican lawmakers politicians. They invest great effort — even reshaping their institutions — not in changing public policy but in staging political confrontations.

And some Republican senators have already declared that they won't vote for the budget reconciliation bill anyway, because it doesn't contain some of the provisions of Obamacare that they would like to pretend to repeal. As provisions of the bill fall victim to the Byrd Rule, it is possible that more senators will be disappointed that this bill-that-will-never-be-law does not contain more provisions-that-never-had-a-chance, and the bill will fail to pass the Senate.

* "Requires" — it's not like legislators will actually be thrown in jail or defeated for reelection if they don't come up with a budget resolution. This year is the first time since 2009 that both chambers have agreed on a budget resolution.

** I'm skipping over some boring details that are laid out in the CRS report. The Byrd Rule was adopted in stages over a six-year period.

This post is part of Mischiefs of Faction, an independent political science blog featuring reflections on the party system. See more Mischiefs of Faction posts here.