The What-If Machine
The WHIM research project aims to create software that can come up with ideas, of the kind that you can use to write a story or a joke. WHIM stands for “What-If Machine”.
You can play with Version 1 over here, and generate metaphors like “What if honored warriors were to be discharged from their armies, hatch plots and become contemptible traitors?” or plots such as “What if there was an engineer who woke up in a doghouse as a dog but could still fly?” or “What if there was an ox who lost her horn, which she used for music therapy, so decided instead to use a harp?”
But that’s only one small part of the project, which has spawned quite a lot of research. The project as a whole is part of computational creativity, which is about both trying to make a software that can be creative like a human and exploring ways that software can help humans be creative.
