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"Once it is running, Racter needs no input from the outside world. It's just cookingfor itself'
(Richard Chamherlain)J5
The key phrase here is the first half of the sentence "once it is running". Once it is
running, a program like Racter or TALE-SPIN can produce an endless scroll of more or
less sensical output on the screen and appear to be authorless, but to get to that point, a
large amount of very human authoring /programming needs to go into the structures,
templates and algorithms that enable the productive ease.
It is not the program Racter which has mastered the basics ofthe English syntax, but the
programmers behind it, who, drawing on extensive research in linguistics, have extracted
and turned into formulae the basic combinatory rules of English; it is the programmers
who selected a range ofvocabulary fitting these structures and who created the templates
used for the generation of text. Only after these operations can the program do its part
and generate its - often surprising and 'sensible' - new combinations.
A closer look at the templates indeed takes away much of the astonishment about the
results Racter can produce seemingly without very little outside intervention. Jorn Barger
examines the question of templates in his essay "The Policeman's Beard Was Largely
Prefab" and quotes some examples which give an interesting insight into the working of
the program. A typical template available with the commercial version of the Imrac
compiler, which allows users to create their own templates for Racter, would read
a %PEOPLE #
b >HERO*person[&P] >VILLAIN*person[&N] #
c $VILLAIN #RND3 bit robbed hit $HERO , #
d but $HERO just #RND3 smiled laughed shrugged . #
, new:
e $VILLAIN snarled >x=Saint,HERO It> $X , I presume X*person lY=X,hoo
A template like this would then make Racter randomly select a Hero and a Villain from
the People list, select one of the three verbs in lines c and d, and produce an outcome
which might read like this:
'S Ledstetter, "Racter", P.40 •
Chapter 5 - page 190