Computers are an important part of today's world. They do many things well. But they won't be taking the place of authors anytime soon. It turns out computers aren't so great at creating poems or short stories.

Scientists and others found this out in May 2016. Scientists created computer programs that write sonnets. They used the programs in a competition at Dartmouth College. The contest had three judges. They were asked to read ten sonnets. Six of the sonnets were written by people. Four were created by computers. The judges were asked to see if they could tell if the author was a person or a computer.

The judges read all the poems. They were able to tell which poems were written by a computer program. These poems didn't flow well. They didn't tell a story. And some words weren't used in the right way.

The competition also had a part for short stories. Computers were not much better at writing these. For the most part, the judges weren't fooled.

A professor at a Massachusetts college was not surprised by the results. She thinks poetry needs to come from life. She questions the idea of trying to get a machine to write poems.

Dan Rockmore and Michael Casey are professors at Dartmouth. They helped set up the contest. Rockmore said he was surprised that the computers didn't do better with the poems. Casey said the results showed that it's hard for a machine to copy the arts.

Still, Rockmore and Casey think computers could someday write beautiful poems or stories. They say computers just need the right programming.

"[Suppose computers] could write beautiful stories that made people happy," Rockmore said. "That would be a wonderful thing. It wouldn't mean humans weren't writing great things, too. They are both different art forms."

Vocabulary

competition(noun)：a game or contest in which people try to win

professor(noun)：a teacher in a college or a university (schools that people can attend after high school)

program(noun)：something that is run on a computer

sonnet(noun)：a poem of 14 lines that has a certain rhyming pattern; it also has a set rhythm and form