Skald: Minstrel Reconstructed

Scott Turner´s Minstrel is considered a landmark story-generation system, cited as an important system in our field´s history for the quality of its output. Other influential systems such as Meehan´s Tale-Spin have inspired modern successors, but although a few systems have followed Minstrel´s case-based approach, none of them use its “imaginative recall” technique. This paper details Skald, a publicly-released rational reconstruction of Minstrel that enables exploration of Turner´s work and discovery of new implications for future research. A key finding is a brittleness only hinted at in Turner´s publications: the story library, story templates, and the recall system must be tailored to one another for Turner´s original system to function. We show that this can be ameliorated through a number of techniques, however, from adding differential costs to transformations to removing the least-successful author-level actions. Another key finding is that Turner´s original “boredom” system limited leverage of the story library. An alternative and its results are presented here. What emerges from this work is a different picture of the original Minstrel than that currently present in the literature, as well as a new system, Skald, that sets the stage for future research to explore Turner´s ideas for story generation.