Socrates and Aristotle Are Fighting Again is computer-generated novel I produced for NaNoGenMo 2015 (that’s National Novel Generation Month).

The code I wrote to generate the novel is available on GitHub, and includes a write-up of the techniques I used. In short, I used web-scraping to make a corpus of philosophical text, then used a Markov model to generate text from it. In an attempt to make something that resembles conversation and a Socratic text (with the Aristotle learning from Socrates), I added some twists onto this classic technique. The results range from confusing and boring to confusing but funny.

You can read “Socrates and Aristotle Are Fighting Again” online right now!