I wrote a short essay on Poesytron 575 for the Jivin' Ladybug, an online journal for poetry, poets, and other linguistic-artistic delights. You should check it out--if not to hear me ramble about the program and its implications, then to read the several never-before-seen haiku of Poesytron's that are in the essay.
I highly recommend browsing through the poetry on the Jivin' Ladybug. I particularly like Pat Lawrence's For a Frog, which is an entirely different angle on haiku, meaning, and--of course--frogs. And for another computer/poetry mashup, Urayoán Noel read a sonnet by Rubén Darío (in its original Spanish) into an English-language voice recognition software.
Thanks for spreading the word!
ReplyDeleteYa know.. I was thinking. As long as you're just randomly generating words, it doesn't seem like there's much room for development of this idea. I know it's the randomness that you like, lol, and I think I get that. I just went to a talk the other day by Persi Diaconis, the guy who decided it takes 7 times to shuffle a deck of cards to "randomize" it. The main idea of his talk, though, was that despite a lifetime of searching, he hadn't found any randomness in nature (nor in computer code). It could be cool (theoretically) to study the relationship btwn your random number generator and your output - although that's probably unrealistic.
ReplyDeleteAnyway - I think it would be a really interesting scientific study to combine this sort of idea - randomly generating poetry from a database - if you could model the development of your word bank from human learning patterns. i.e. start with a blank slate, add artificial intelligence, and monitor poetry generation alongside an increasing wordbank. You may be able to draw some interesting conclusions about early childhood mental development and/or the development of the arts alongside the "awakening" mind (anthropological development). AI is growing at an alarming rate, and I think it has gotten easier to come by (I mean, geeze, the Ferby was popular like 10 years ago!)
Just a thought. :D Love, Erin
Thanks for the comment, Erin. I haven't thought about Furbies in a long time!
ReplyDeleteThere actually is only a small bit of randomness in the current Poesytron code. The selection of words is non-random, but uses very, very simple rules. I have a lot of plans to refine these rules--I just have to set aside some time to work on the code! I definitely need to expand the source database, and I HOPE that I can incorporate something like Charles Hartman's Concord program (http://oak.conncoll.edu/cohar/Programs.htm) to add more contextual rules to the selection parameters.
You are right that there is hardly anything in nature that is random. What biologists & statisticians think of as "random error" is actually sampled from a distribution, and not something that is truly random. In other words, there is a such thing as a random sample, but it is (almost?) always drawn from a non-random pool.
It's said that the best random number generator out there is one that takes the last digit from an atmospheric noise variable (see http://www.random.org/). A little exploration of that site, and you'll want to know all you never knew you could about random number generation.