science

Theaitre

Theaitre 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 Theaitre rather than just read about it. In short: Theaitre (stylized as THEaiTRE) is an interdisciplinary research project investigating to what extent artificial intelligence is able to generate theatre play scripts. The first theatre play produced within the project, AI: When a Robot Writes a Play, premiered online on February 26, 2021.

Key takeaways

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

Reference excerpt

Theaitre (stylized as THEaiTRE) is an interdisciplinary research project investigating to what extent artificial intelligence is able to generate theatre play scripts. The first theatre play produced within the project, AI: When a Robot Writes a Play, premiered online on February 26, 2021.

Goal Following similar previous projects such as Sunspring, a short sci-fi movie with an automatically generated script, the THEaiTRE project investigates whether current language generation approaches are mature enough to generate a theatre play script that could be successfully performed in front of an audience. The project falls within the area of generative art, famously represented e.g. by the portrait of Edmond de Belamy which was generated by an artificial neural network. In this field, artists are trying to use automated techniques to create "art", questioning the modern definition of art itself. More broadly, the project aims at promoting cooperation rather than competition of humans and artificial intelligence as the more beneficial approach for both. The first theatre play created within the project, titled AI: When a Robot Writes a Play, was presented in February 2021 at the 100th anniversary of the premiere of the R.U.R. theatre play by the Czech author Karel Čapek to celebrate the invention of the word "robot". While R.U.R. was a play written by a human about robots (and humans), THEaiTRE tried to reverse this idea by presenting a play written by a "robot" (artificial intelligence) about humans (and robots). The script of the play was published online, with marked parts of the text which were written manually or manually post-edited. The analysis shows that 90% of the script is automatically generated, with 10% manually written or manually post-edited. The project also plans to produce a second play in 2022, addressing some of the many shortcomings of the approach used to generate the first play, as well as attempting to further minimize the amount of human influence on the script.

Approach At the core of the project is the GPT-2 language model by OpenAI with various adjustments motivated by the task of generating theatre play scripts, for which the model is not particularly trained. The GPT-2 model is used in the usual way, providing it with a start of a document and prompting it to generate a continuation of the document. Specifically, the input for GPT-2 in this project is typically a short description of the scene setting, followed by a few lines to introduce the characters and start the dialogue. The model then generates 10 continuation lines, and hands control to the user, who can then either ask the model to continue generating, or make various edits before letting the model to generate further, deleting some parts of the script or adding new lines into the script. The adjustments include restricting the generator to only produce lines pertaining to characters appearing in the input prompt, limiting the repetitiveness of the generated text, and employing automatic summarization of the input prompt and the generated text to overcome the limitation of the GPT-2 model which only attends to the last 1,024 subword tokens. The limitations of the model include, among other, a lack of distinctiveness and self-consistency of the characters, an inability to generate the script for the whole play (scripts for individual scenes are generated independently), and errors due to the employment of automated machine translation, as GPT-2 generates English texts but the final play script is being produced in Czech language. The source codes of the project are available under the MIT licence. The project has also published some sample outputs.

Team The project is a cooperation of the following experts, all based in Prague, Czech Republic:

computational linguists from the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University theatre experts from the Švanda Theatre and from the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague hackers from CEE Hacks The project is financially supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic.

References

External links Project website

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Theaitre

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Theaitre 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 Theaitre 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 Theaitre 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 Theaitre

In research: Theaitre 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 Theaitre 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: Theaitre is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 2020 plays, Applications of artificial intelligence, Karel Čapek, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Theaitre 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 Theaitre in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Theaitre 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 Theaitre out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Theaitre in simple terms?

Why does Theaitre 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 Theaitre?

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 Theaitre.