Stimulated by Levi’s juxtaposition, and motivated by the possibilities of extending an Oulipian sensibility into the sphere of literary criticism (OuCriPo?), the authors set out to develop a means by which a given novel could express itself as a game of chess. Initial success here led to expanded ambition, since there was nothing to stop us from elaborating our modest analytic protocol into a full-fledged “engine” that would permit works of literature to confront one another on the chess board. We have advanced this project to what we think of as a workable tool for a certain sort of ludic literary investigation, and we present it here for the first time, together with some preliminary results drawn from several thousand games we have run to date. The current version of the program is playable on the Cabinet website [see sidebar—eds.], and we would be delighted if it proved useful to those wishing to pursue this or related lines of inquiry.
via Paul Greenberg
Cabinet Magazine has developed an algorithm to turn novels into chess games. I thought this was a joke at first, and although the moves are random, the games do play: "the program searches through the white text until it finds the first tuple corresponding to a movable piece (in the case of an opening move, either a pawn or a knight), and then, having settled on the piece that will open, continues searching through the text until it encounters a tuple designating a square to which that piece can be moved."
Cabinet could take this further by associating character names with words or pieces (similar to how Wordnik associates words with "moods") instead of just looking for random "tuple" appearances.
It's still fun to watch a game. Cabinet also discusses the best match-ups found to date, and explores the idea of a "grand-master" or unbeatable novel.
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