Abstract
Rube Goldberg’s cartoons famously depict absurd, unreasonably complex machines invented by Professor Lucifer G. Butts to carry out simple tasks. Rube Goldberg machine has now become a byword for overly complicated machinery or bureaucracy of any kind. The specific structure of Goldberg’s original cartoons, however, is quite interesting. Beyond simply being complex, his machines are based on a particular repertoire of objects used in stereotypical, coincidental, and comical ways, exhibiting almost as much of a narrative logic as a mechanical logic. In this paper, we analyze the structure of these cartoon machines’ construction, with a view towards being able to generate them using a planning formalization of this analysis.
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Olsen, D., Nelson, M.J. (2017). The Narrative Logic of Rube Goldberg Machines. In: Nunes, N., Oakley, I., Nisi, V. (eds) Interactive Storytelling. ICIDS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10690. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71027-3_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71027-3_9
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