The Tin Men

What Hacker News says

1. ggmAug 2023
   "Tin Men" by Michael Frayn (1965) explores the application of Markov chains to machine generated headlines, amongst other things. I often think it should be mandatory reading on an AI & Society agenda.

   (Yes, the other kind of cyclic headlines to the underlying premise of this article)

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2. beardywMar 2022
   In The Tin Men by Michael Frayn (1965) their attempts to computerise the news include ranking disasters by number killed divided by distance away. This is pretty much how the news works (though you might include colour of skin).

   There seems to be still an idea that news should be presented in newspaper form. That is, there are "important" stories which warrant pushing to the top. If you want to know what stories are important, I think the trick will be to allow each subscriber to feed that back. Not by algorithms ( please!) but in some way which no other organisation has managed to get right. Over to you.

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3. gilleainJun 2019
   A similar idea is explored in the novel 'The Tin Men' by Michael Frayn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tin_Men).

   One of the characters invents 'Unit Headline Language' (UHL) with constructs like 'Strike Threat Probe Row'. A key feature of the language is that you can arrange the units in many different ways and it makes as much - indeed as little - sense.

   "UHL, Goldwasser quickly realised, was an ideal answer to the problem of making a story run from day to day in an automated paper. Say, for example, that the randomiser turned up

   * STRIKE THREAT

   By adding one unit at random to the formula each day the story could go:

   * STRIKE THREAT BID * STRIKE THREAT PROBE * STRIKE THREAT PLEA

   And so on. Or the units could be added cumulatively:

   * STRIKE THREAT PLEA * STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE * STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE * STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK * STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK HOPE * STRIKE THREAT PLEA PROBE MOVE SHOCK HOPE STORM

   Or the units could be used entirely at random:

   * LEAK ROW LOOMS * TEST ROW LEAK ..."

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4. beardywMay 2018
   IIRC in The Tin Men by Michael Frayn (1965) the computer used the number dead divided by the distance away to determine newsworthiness. Using some of the observations here I am sure we could improve on that.

   It is gut wrenchingly sad that every death is not treated equaly ... though much in the same way, every life.

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5. rgSep 2011

     *"The system knows that women generally favor stories 
     about Brad Pitt, but after some real-time analysis, it 
     can quickly realize that men are far more like to click 
     on a Brad Pitt story that involves a sports movie."*
   

   This is like Michael Frayn's first comic novel "The Tin Men" (1965), about programming a computer to produce an "automated newspaper".

     "But people really preferred an air crash. ... What
     people enjoyed most was about 70 dead, with some 20
     survivors including children rescued after at least
     one night in open boats.  They liked it to be backed
     up with a story about a middle-aged housewife who had
     been booked to fly aboard the plane but who had 
     changed her mind at the last moment."

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