The AI That Writes One Character at a Time
Contents › Chapter 3 Pulling the lever
Pull the lever
The character where the reel stops becomes the next character
View in 3DWrite the character where it stops
Back to the fully trained AI. Now we pull the lever. The reel spins and stops, and the character in the slot under the arrow becomes the next character. It stops on wide slots more often, but sometimes it stops on a thin one. So the top character does not always win.
Next-character candidates: ‘␣’ 69% · ‘"’ 22% · ‘⏎’ 8.8%
Why?What the AI really does is pick one random number between 0 and 1. Line up all the percents into one long bar, and the character where that number lands is picked. The "random number" in the box below is that number. When you pull the lever, the dial panel and wires light up to show the dials being read. Trained dials do not turn while the AI writes. Dials only turn while it is learning.
Learn moreChoosing by percents like this is called sampling. This project fixes the order of the random numbers (a seed), so you get the same characters every time you watch.
View this scene in 3D →More in the series
A small AI (a character-level language model with 62,652 dials) was really trained on 40 fairy tales and fables retold for this project (about 376,021 characters), and every number here was calculated by that AI. It is a tiny model for learning; real chatbots are far bigger.