It seems that literature is turning out to be the perfect way to train AI, and literary news concerning artificial intelligence has been pretty non stop in recent months. Now the Harry Potter series has been put through a supercomputer to interesting results!
IMB’s supercomputer Watson has been reading the Harry Potter books and analysing the characters and it made a few surprising discoveries. Watson uses natural language processing to reveal insights from large amounts of data, and it’s this processing that has helped to analyse the books, and structure the data within.
Testing personally traits, emotion, extroversion and experience Watson decided that Neville and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named are actually very similar. Both ranked high on neuroticism, while ranking low on being open to experience, maybe Voldemort did mark the wrong boy as his equal after all.
And while we all know that Hermione is a strong female character, you maybe surprised to find that Watson found her more assertive than Voldemort!
However, the only character that matches Voldemort on levels of anger, is Harry himself, indicative maybe of the mark that Voldemort has left on the character.
Interestingly the computer also compared the books to the movies, and found the Weasleys most changed by the transition to the big screen. Watson also found that the movies made Ron funnier, and for those who loved book Ginny you won’t be at all surprised to find she ranked much lower for both intellect and gregariousness in the movies compared to the books.
Did Watson enjoy the books? Thankfully he’s not developed enough yet to give an emotional review, and maybe that’s a good thing!
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