science

Sunspring

Sunspring is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Sunspring rather than just read about it. In short: Sunspring is a 2016 experimental science fiction short film entirely written by an artificial intelligence bot using neural networks. It was conceived by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Oscar Sharp and NYU AI researcher Ross Goodwin and produced by film production company, End Cue along with Allison Friedman and Andrew Swett.

Key takeaways

Sunspring belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Sunspring to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Sunspring from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Sunspring is a 2016 experimental science fiction short film entirely written by an artificial intelligence bot using neural networks. It was conceived by BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Oscar Sharp and NYU AI researcher Ross Goodwin and produced by film production company, End Cue along with Allison Friedman and Andrew Swett. It stars Thomas Middleditch, Elisabeth Grey, and Humphrey Ker as three people, namely H, H2, and C, living in a future world and eventually connecting with each other through a love triangle. The script of the film was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory (LSTM) by an AI bot named Benjamin. Originally made for the Sci-Fi-London film festival's 48hr Challenge, it was released online by technology news website Ars Technica on 9 June 2016.

Premise Sunspring narrates the story of three people - H (Middleditch), H2 (Grey), and C (Ker) - set in a futuristic world and entangled with murder and love.

Cast Thomas Middleditch as H Elisabeth Grey as H2 Humphrey Ker as C

Production Oscar Sharp originally created the film for the 48hr Film Challenge contest of Sci-Fi-London, a film festival which focuses on science fiction. For the challenge, contestants are given a set of prompts (mostly props and lines) that have to appear in a movie they make over the next two days. It eventually contested in the festival and was nominated among the final top ten films Sharp collaborated with his longtime associate Ross Goodwin, an AI researcher in New York University to create the AI bot, which was initially called Jetson. The bot, which later came to call itself Benjamin, wrote the screenplay including stage directions and dialog. The garbled script was then interpreted by Sharp who directed the actors to construe the plot points themselves and enact the play. According to Ars Technica, the final plot turned out to be a tale of romance and murder, set in a dark future world.

Benjamin, the automatic screenwriter Called the world's first automatic screenwriter, Benjamin is a self-improving LSTM RNN machine intelligence trained on human screenplays conceived by Goodwin and Sharp. It was trained to write the screenplay by feeding it with a corpus of dozens of sci-fi screenplays found online—mostly movies from the 1980s and 90s.

Music The film contains a song from Brooklyn-based electro-acoustic duo Tiger and Man, with lyrics written by Benjamin using a database of 30,000 folk songs. As well as a score written by composer Andrew Orkin.

Reception CNet called it "a beautiful, bizarre sci-fi novelty." Critic Amanda Kooser said, "...probably won't start a rush for replacing human screenwriters with machines. Some day, neural networks may get better at imitating the art of coherent storytelling, but we're not there yet. That doesn't mean "Sunspring" isn't entertaining or worthy of viewing. It is. It's a thought experiment come to life, a novelty." As of April 2019, it has surpassed 1 million views on YouTube.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Sunspring

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Sunspring claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Sunspring before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Sunspring ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Sunspring

In research: Sunspring appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Sunspring in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Sunspring is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2016 English-language films, 2016 films, 2016 short films, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Sunspring outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Sunspring in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Sunspring means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Sunspring out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Sunspring in simple terms?

Why does Sunspring matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Sunspring?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Sunspring.