Science Fiction
Dictionary
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Latest By
Category:
Armor
Artificial
Intelligence
Biology
Clothing
Communication
Computers
Culture
Data Storage
Displays
Engineering
Entertainment
Food
Input Devices
Lifestyle
Living Space
Manufacturing
Material
Media
Medical
Miscellaneous
Robotics
Security
Space Tech
Spacecraft
Surveillance
Transportation
Travel
Vehicle
Virtual
Person
Warfare
Weapon
Work
"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
- Arthur C. Clarke
 |
| 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.
Comment/Join this discussion ( 0 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This |
Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Studio 5, The Stars
More Ideas
and Technology by J.G. Ballard
Tech news articles related to Studio 5, The Stars
Tech news articles related to works by J.G. Ballard
Verse Transcriber-related
news articles:
- 200,000 Computer-Generated Books
- Computer 'Aesop' Writes Fables With A Moral
- Scheherazade, An Open Story Generator
- The Next (Computer) Rembrandt
- Xiaoice AI Now A Poet
- Shelley.ai AI Terrifies Thanks To Reddit's Nosleep
- Deepfakes From OpenAI GPT-2 Algorithm
| Robot Baristas Learn Their Trade Without Paying Royalties |
| Vesuvius Challenge Accepted - Ancient Burnt Scroll Read! |
| Humans Love Helping Other Species |
| AI-Powered Jesus Hologram Accepts Confessions |
Want to Contribute an
Item?
It's easy:
Get the name of the item, a
quote, the book's name and the author's name, and Add
it here.
| <Previous | Next> |
|
|
|
Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Science Fiction Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
|
Science Fiction
Timeline
1600-1899
1900-1939
1940's 1950's
1960's 1970's
1980's 1990's
2000's 2010's
'Do not waste your priceless company on the unappreciative folds of a sleep pod...'
'...so we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
