It’s 10pm, November 30th, 2013. An author, aiming to finish a novel in November, takes up his laptop and begins typing furiously. By midnight, he’s completed I Got a Alligator for a Pet. A world record? No, just a clever bit of code.I Got a Alligator for a Pet, written by a developer’s computer program, was part of National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo), a competition in which programmers write apps that automatically generate at least 50,000 words.Emulating National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)—a November tradition where authors attempt to complete an entire novel (start to finish) in a month—developer and internet artist Darius Kazemi started NaNoGenMo last year.Like NaNoWriMo, NaNoGenMo offers no prizes. Unlike NaNoWriMo, the computer-generated novels need not make one whit of sense (though many do). There are few rules beyond submission of the book and the code responsible for writing it.Many of last year’s submissions used source content by humans—dream journals, tweets, fan fiction, Jane Austen, Homer. One is 50,000 words of roommates arguing about cleaning the apartment. Another has the simplistic feel of a reading primer. While the results aren’t exactly Shakespeare or Hemingway, they are, with few exceptions comical.Kazemi’s contribution, Teens Wander Around a House, begins, “Philomena, Dita, Vivianna, Darby, Kiah, and Gale found themselves dropped off at the same party at the same time by the irrespective mothers. How awkward.”Indeed....
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