A challenge to computer programmers to create 50,000-word novels via computer code that was listed on GitHub last month led to 188 projects.
This was the third annual NaNoGenMo competition, which stemmed from a 2013 tweet. Inspired by the National Novel Writing Month, the computer coding contest also ran in November.
“The “novel” is defined however you want. It could be 50,000 repetitions of the word “meow”. It could literally grab a random novel from Project Gutenberg. It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s 50k+ words,” explained Darius Kazemi, the founder of the contest.
The New Stack has more about this year’s entries:
“I took a picture of the cover of “The Sun Also Rises,” converted it to a PNG and then decoded the PNG and for each pixel got the nearest named color,” the author wrote on his novel’s official GitHub issue page. “It’s 800 chapters long and 803,218 words (according to wc). There’s also an audiobook version that’s 173 hours and like 2.5 gigs.” You can hear a delightful sample on the novel’s official web page.