How well can robots write? Experts in Czechia [Czech Republic] are creating the first play scripted by artificial intelligence. The project—called THEaiTRE—is meant to celebrate the 100th anniversary of R.U.R., a 1921 science fiction play that gave us the word robot. Getting a machine to write is a complicated process, but basically, researchers show the robot existing drama scripts, and it generates something similar. The team has been “quite amazed” at how well the process works, Rudolf Rosa, one of the researchers, told Tech Xplore. “We only fed it a few lines from a script and it picked up its genre, structure, topic, and character names, using this information to generate more or less plausible lines.” This play is scheduled to be staged by a professional theater group in January. In the future, Rosa hopes to produce a different play written and performed by robots, without human help.