What is Poesytron 575?

Poesytron 575 is a simple computer code I wrote that generates haiku.

(The breakdown of its name: "poesy" means the art of writing poetry; "-tron" because it all happens in a computer; and "575" for the standard syllable count of English haiku.)

But Poesytron is a process, not a product.  I wrote the program so that I could experiment with the experience of reading haiku, and one single "finished" program is not even going to begin to satisfy all the questions I have in mind.  Some of those questions are:

Can a poem still have meaning even if the "author" is a mindless computer, acting on defined rules?

If it has meaning, does it have any value?

What is the role of the author, or the reader, in poetry?

Can a "virtual" poet invoke the same emotions in a reader as a human poet?

And this is just a starting point.

This is an ambitious project for me.  I am not (a) a poet (or at least more than an amateur one), nor (b) a computer programmer.  What I am is a scientist, so I've been trained to ask a lot of questions and not to rely too heavily on assumptions.  So I think that even if I am going outside of my field on this project, it will be a fun journey for me and I still might be able to make some interesting observations along the way.

With this blog, I want to track the evolution of Poesytron 575 and see if it ends up writing any good poetry.  ("Good," of course, is going to be very, very subjective!)  There are a few different types of posts I'm going to make:

1. The haiku that Poesytron writes.

2. The computer code that is Poesytron 575.  (I will try to include enough code so that people who know stuff about computer programming can use it themselves if they want to, but I'll also try to keep these posts fairly non-technical, so anyone can understand how exactly Poesytron does what it does.)

3. Stuff about poetry and meaning and what the point of this all is--basically, whatever I think is really, really interesting that relates to the Poesytron Project.

So that's what I'm doing and why I'm here.  Now, on to the haiku!