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" I think that computers today allow us one last opportunity to provide something like a level playingfield in America."
- William Gibson
 |
| Verse Transcriber | ||
| A device that would produce perfect poetry, given the necessary parameters. |
Do you write poetry? I mean, yourself. Given the necessary technology, you can put your feet up and watch TV, and let your trusty IBM unit do the work.
| "Do you mean she wrote these herself?"
I nodded. "It has been done that way. In fact the method enjoyed quite a vogue for twenty or thirty centuries. Shakespeare tried it, Milton, Keats and Shelley - it worked reasonably well for them." "But not now," Tony said. "Not since the VT set. How can you compete with an IBM heavy-duty logomatic analogue?" "...Hold on," I told him. I was pasting down one of Xero's satirical pastiches of Rubert Brooke and was six lines short. I handed Tony the master tape and he played it into the IBM, set the meter, rhyme scheme, verbal pairs, and then switched on, waited for the tape to chunter out of the delivery head, tore off six lines and passed them back to me. I didn't even need to read them. For the next two hours we worked hard, at dusk had completed over 1,000 lines and broke off for a well-earned drink. |
| Technovelgy from Studio 5, The Stars,
by J.G. Ballard. Published by Berkeley Medallion in 1971 Additional resources -
|
It's not like IBM had a monopoly on poetry machines; there was also the Philco Versomatic.
Most computer science students write at least one program that generates verbiage on command. A good example of a computer program that writes poetry is Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet. As you can tell by the name, it's been around for a while; he wrote the first one in the mid-1980's.
Here's how it works:
The earliest use of computers in constructing algorithmic sentences that I've found dates from 1952. The Ferranti Mark 1 created love letters from a static list of words, a very simple version of the way modern newsbots build articles from preprogrammed phrases.
“Dear Honey, my avid appetite lusts after your anxious desire. You are my beautiful tenderness my adorable longing,” begins one such letter signed, “Yours seductively—MUC.”
Compare to the knowledge engine from Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift, the novel-writing machine from 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (1948) by George Orwell, the bard from Someday (1956) by Isaac Asimov, the rthetorizer from The Penultimate Truth (1964) by Philip K. Dick and the electronic bard from The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age (1965).
RKCP reads a selection of poems by a particular author or authors and then creates a "language model" of that author’s work. The language model incorporates computer-based language analysis and mathematical modeling techniques. RKCP can then write original poems from that model. The poems have a similar style to the author(s) originally analyzed, but are completely original new poetry.
Here's a sample haiku written in the style of Kathleen Frances Wheeler:
Crazy moon child
Read more about Ray Kurzweil's Cybernetic Poet (RKCP).
Hide from your coffin
To spite your doom.
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