Write like a man

Hu-man, that is. The March issue of the Atlantic has a piece about the Loebner Prize, which is essentially a competition for "most human human" and "most human computer" that follows the basic rules of the Turing test. Humans try, through instant messaging, to convince a human interlocutor that they're real people and not programs, while programs are run that are designed to convince the same human judges that they--the programs--are actually human.

It's a good article, and it leaves me wondering whether any of these programmers have tried studying literature. After all, if your job is to create a clump of text that gives the illusion of a human consciousness, there have been people trying to do that for millennia--they're called fiction writers. Critics of the structuralist school loved to point out that what we called "characters" are in fact simply repeated words/signs (e.g., "Maggie Tulliver") that tend to be clustered close to other repeated signs ("duty," "brown eyes," "unruly hair," "love for Tom") and skillfully arranged to give the illusion of a real human psyche. If you studied how the idiosyncratic agglomeration of traits and preoccupations makes a character seem real, and how a slightly distracted (i.e., not "on the nose") dialogic style makes conversation feel human, it could help a lot in designing a program that could fool judges for five minutes.

To all you programmers reading this: we can split the prize money.

Women Who Look Extraordinary

Henry James and OK Cupid make for an unusual match. But the online dating site recently released statistical findings that confirm, more than a century later, James's observation of what made certain women particularly beguiling.

In his 1880 novel Portrait of a Lady, James describes his inexpressibly intriguing heroine, Isabel Archer, in comparison to her more traditionally beautiful older sister Edith:

Nineteen persons out of twenty (including the younger sister herself) pronounced Edith infinitely the prettier of the two; but the twentieth, besides reversing this judgment, had the entertainment of thinking all the others aesthetic vulgarians.

In other words, the physical allure of Isabel is not that she's universally considered beautiful, but that she is considered extremely beautiful by a minority that recognizes that most people wouldn't agree--and gets a little puff of confident self-satisfaction from that very fact.

If only more online daters read James. OK Cupid's blog (and informal statistical wing), OK Trends, recently announced results that suggest that the Jamesian prescription holds true for profile pictures: women who post pictures that prompt widespread disagreement about their beauty actually get substantially more messages than traditionally attractive women.

Maybe OK Cupid's stats aren't exactly rigorous science, but they're interesting. I'm still willing to classify this as a literary insight belatedly discovered by science...someone call Jonah Lehrer.