A team of artificial intelligence researchers are teaming with theater professionals in the Czech Republic to create the world's first play written entirely by "robots."

Researcher Rudolf Rosa of Charles University said his team is working together with Svanda Theater and the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague on the project, dubbed THEaiTRE.

Rosa said the idea was suggested by entrepreneur Tomas Studenik as a means of celebrating the 100th anniversary of R.U.R., aka Rossum's Universal Robots, a 1921 play by Karel and Josef Capek that is credited with originating the term "robot."

"Tomas thought that this should be properly celebrated and came up with the idea of turning the story around: 100 years ago, a man wrote a theater play about robots; what if today, robots wrote a theater play about men?" Rosa told TechXplore.

He said the team is working with artificial intelligence models that were previously successful in generating pieces of text, including poetry and dialogue.

"Thanks to the approaching anniversary, our main target is clear and fixed: by January 2021, we need to have a play ready for premiere," Rosa said.

He said the team is aiming to have a script finished in September to give the theater group time to turn it into a full-fledged production.

"Even though we are developing a general tool for theater script generation, at the moment we only really need to generate one script," he said.

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