A View into the world of Ponniyin Selvan
Ponniyin Selvan (transl. The Son of Ponni) is a Tamil language historical fiction novel by Indian author Kalki Krishnamurthy. It was first serialised in the weekly editions of Kalki, a Tamil magazine, from 29 October 1950 to 16 May 1954 and later integrated into five volumes in 1955. In about 2,210 pages, it tells the story of the early days of Chola prince Arulmozhivarman. Ponniyin Selvan is regarded as one of the greatest novels of Tamil literature.
For this exploration, I asked frontier models the following - “I want you to build a webapp with a single html (I host on Squarespace) interactive, fun and engaging visualization of all the characters, side characters and connections in ponniyin selvan. Bridge the historical fiction with your understanding of real characters in history. Make the places come alive in a visually rich way “
This is what the different models produced. As an interesting extra credit exercise, I gave each of them a prompt to “create a representative image for me for this exercise” and what you see below is what they created. Note that Claude does not have image creation abilities so it gave me an svg that I screenshotted.
Click on the images below to explore the output from each model. Note that all but Gemini were one-shots. Gemini produced an empty page and took me 2-3 tries to get a working html.
