Cyber Poet

[ziloo]

The line that we always see following each post by our VCF comrade
Carlsson got me thinking. I remembered some years ago in a book
about cybernetics, the author talked about art and new experiments with
computers in poetry. Based on the references in the book and some
search on the web:

In May, 1962, Horizon Magazine published a selection of poems by an
up and coming poet, the "Auto-Beatnik". Some of which are:

Roses

Few fingers go like narrow laughs.
An ear won't keep few fishes,
Who is that rose in that blind house?
And all slim, gracious, blind planes are coming,
They cry badly along a rose,
To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender.

Steaks

Is that the automaton that smells like the tear of grass?
All blows have glue, few toothpicks have wood,
Direct a button but I may battle the ham,
The crafty carnival's kite daintily massacres the scalp.
Yes, we would, you shall,
Shall I not tighten a moose's parasite?

Auto-Beatnik was a computer program created by R.M. Worthy and others
at the Laboratory for Automata Research of the Librascope Division of
General Precision, Inc, a company which manufactured computers and
other electronic equipment in Glendale, California. The computers used
for this study were LGP 30, and RPC 4000.

 

[carlsson]

Heh. I recently got another of those nonsense spam messages - I think it tries to sell some fertility drugs, but it doesn't say explicitely. I have adapted it a bit to give it more flow:

Basil may be inelastic. Whenever in Faustian Madrid, try an adventitious or extraordinary councelor. Artillery, try feedback and belly on like a needlepoint. Be journal, not fidget. Some scam try brusque. Candle temporary and axisymmetrically some, except not born, not occlude but cutover limousine.

If TV commercials were equally vague in their advertisments, it would not be very profitable.

 

[ziloo]

The Horizon scribe explains that:

Librascope engineers, concerned with the problem of effective
communication with machines in simple English, first 'fed' an LGP 30
computer with 32 grammatical patterns and an 850-word vocabulary,
allowing it to select at random from the words and patterns to form
sentences. The results included "Roses". Then Worthy and his men shifted to
a more advanced RPC 4000, fed with a store of about 3,500 words and
128 sentence structures, which produced ... more advanced poems. ;-)