We started out by discussing how Sloan does his research, because Sourdough has some of the most accurate representations of robots you’ll find in a work of fiction. But it also has impeccably researched descriptions of how to make sourdough bread, which is a pretty interesting scientific process in itself. Sloan said he talked to several roboticist friends about his main character, who works as a software developer for robot arms. But he also incorporated his personal knowledge of San Francisco startup culture, as well as sourdough cultures. He has made sourdough bread himself, though he admitted it wasn’t particularly successful. Cooking has become a form of science, Sloan said, and developments in biotech have taken food into the laboratory.
One of the big topics of our conversation, as well as the Q/A afterward, was Sloan’s foray into building a simple machine-learning algorithm that can complete a sentence. He fed the algorithm on a corpus of text harvested from Galaxy and If magazines, two popular SF periodicals in the 1950s and ’60s. The full texts of both are available for free on the Internet Archive. Then he added his algorithm to a text editor, so you can type in half a sentence, and it will supply the rest. Results, he said, were whimsical and literary enough that he decided to keep playing with it. (You can play with it yourself here.)
