Word: shorted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Brutus.1, a system developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was designed to write short stories on the subject of betrayal--hence the treacherous name. To teach the innocent computer its sinful ways, the computer scientists who designed it set about "mathematizing the concept of betrayal through a series of algorithms and data structures." Most people might assume that betrayal is not easily mathematized, a subject for human emotion and not for symbol manipulators, but the computer seems to have picked up the vice rather well. (A Rensselaer press release states that the programmers also taught Brutus.1 something of deception, evil...
...program's first results have been mixed. This fall, in an online contest at www.instantnovelist.com, Brutus.1 competed against four humans who wrote short stories on the same topic. The computer's entry, "Self-Betrayal," was unremarkable; its first sentence, "Dave Striver loved the university--at least most of the time," seems to fail the "Call me Ishmael" test, and the protagonist's name is clumsily allegorical. In fact, the story came in last in a poll of visitors to the site; the literary field is for now safe from a deluge of machine-produced prose...
When they arrived, they saw Bruno, and "had a short discussion with him," said CPD spokesperson Frank D. Pasquarello...
...which the test is based, were completed only a couple of years ago. Since they were distributed, teachers have been expected to adapt to these frameworks, and students have tried valiantly to mold their answers to the format that the MCAS encourages. However, the timetable has been too short, and it is the students who are being shortchanged...
...M/UT gameday lies somewhere on the Texas importance spectrum between one's wedding anniversary and Christmas. Gigantic flags fly from the homes of graduates as they watch the game from home or attend as one of the 86,000+ spectators. There is interest: a commodity that Harvard has been short on for a long time...