Slashdot Mirror
Darwinian Poetry: From Bad to Verse
For those who say design cannot take place through the process of selection, behold:
Darwinian Poetry.
Cull the prosaic or nonsensical snippets of text, reinforce the rest, and, slowly... genius? Guess we'll find out. Yes, the poems actually
have sex.
Having sex? And this is posted to slashdot? I doubt many readers here will have experience in this area.
bananas like monkeys.
Looks like machines have replaced all poets by 2003. They can spew meaningless junk that noone wants to read with the best of them.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Many /. readers are already sick of hearing about other people having sex. Now our only refuge is mocking us, rubbing our face in it, cause even poems have sex! Am I not prettier than a poem? I guess not.
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
Darwinian Poetry
Welcome to Darwinian Poetry! The goal of this project is to see if non-negotiated collaboration can evolve interesting poetry using (un)natural selection.
Huh?
Ok, here's the idea: starting with a whole bunch (specifically 1,000) randomly generated groups of words (our "poems"), we are going to subject them to a form of natural selection, killing off the "bad" ones and breeding the "good" ones with each other. If enough generations go by, and if the gene pool is rich enough, we should eventually start to see interesting poems emerge.
The cool part is that YOU are the arbiter of what constitutes "good" and "bad" poetry. Once you start, you will be presented with two poems. In all likelihood they will both be abysmal pieces of nonsensical garbage. That's ok. All you have to do is read them both and pick the one you find more appealing, for whatever reason. Your decision might be based on a single word that you happen to like. It doesn't matter. Just pick whichever one strikes your fancy.
Once you choose a poem, your vote will be recorded and two more poems will appear. Keep doing this for as long as you like, and definitely come back frequently.
Over time the poems picked by you, and I hope by thousands of other people, will interbreed and more and more interesting poems will emerge. It could take a while. Weeks...months...I don't know. It all depends on how many people participate, and how often.
Keep coming back, for (I hope) the population will evolve steadily, so each day could bring increasingly interesting poems.
That's it. Just click on the "Get Started" link below to dive right in. Or click the "Get Report" link to find out what the current highest rated poem is, as well as to see other statistics.
THE HOW IT WORKS PAGE:
How it Works
"Many poems were butchered in the making of this site."
The Darwinian Poetry software relies primarily on a mechanism called "crossover", similar to the process that operates on chromosomes in biological evolution, except that here the basic genetic units are words rather than nucleic acids. When the program sees that there is room in the population for new poems (because some unfit poems were...um...culled from the herd) it randomly chooses two surviving poems to serve as parents. These two poems are then crossed over, producing two new offspring.
Here is an example to illustrate. These are two poems that I just grabbed off a test version of the site (color coded for convenience):
forest storefront semifinished decrees confirmed
scheming he congestive curdles refulgent
sceptered not of miffs syncretism
lose the but longer floor
the of but judgeship the
forty troweling him sufficing lysolecithin
of from when esurience they
rest timely wounded the perpend
If these two poems were chosen for breeding, the first thing the program would do is decide how many "snip" points to use. Currently this number ranges between one and five. Let's say 2 came up randomly. Now each poem gets randomly cut in two places. Note that this is different than biological crossover in that the cut points vary between the parents. Whereas real chromosomes need to maintain a constant length, our poems will evolve in length as well as content.
forest storefront SNIP! semifinished decrees confirmed
scheming he congestive curdles refulgent
sceptered not SNIP! of miffs syncretism
lose the but longer floor
the of but judgeship the
forty troweling him SNIP! sufficing lysolecithin
of from when esurience SNIP! they
rest timely wounded the perpend
Now the software performs the crossover operation resulting in two new poems:
forest storefront suffcing lysolecithin
of from when esurience of miffs syncretism
lose the but longer floor
the of but judgeship the
forty troweling him semifinished decrees confirmed
scheming he congestive curdles refulgent
sceptered not they
rest timely wounded the perpend
That's
I can see it already, people with Darwin Fish on their cars, with a poetic bumper sticker....
GeekWares - Buy and Download Today!
Only on Slashdot Read of poems having sex While still I get none
I say interesting and the more I played the more I realized that this is in many ways better than the stuff that I had to read in english class.
Another advantage is that no teacher could ever ask;
What was the authors motivation in writing this particular poem?
I hate that Question
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
The front page is still functioning, but the applet is down for the count.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
"It was the best of times... It was the BLURST OF TIMES?!?! Stupid monkey!"
I hate to be old fashioned about this, but poetry is made by humans. Wearing prose or garbage (in this case) into sensible meter does not a poem make.
Human expression makes poetry.
By process of natural selection, we have just eliminated the weaker servers by use of what ecologists call "The Slashdot Effect." Appearantly, only the stronger servers such as the mighty Google can produce further page views.
What an excellent idea! Software to help computer-inclined high school students (read: a healthy dose of Slashdot readers) complete those pesky English assigments.
Some of the evolutionary poetry is better than what I managed to type out at 0200 after playing Soldier of Fortune 2 for 6 hours straight.
I rather doubt any good poetry will actually come out of this. It seems to me that two good poems with parts interchanged at random "snip points" will be statistically very likely to become bad poems. A more advanced system is probably necessary before anything worthwhile will be produced.
The idea of having people vote on which poems are best is a good one, though. Maybe the same principle could be applied to other computer-generated word stuff.
I know that the following is slightly geared as though you're suggesting to Creationists that they're wrong, but it is more to say that both of your ideas have some merit (meaning there are parts that have been proven or remain unproven).
There's nothing that proves the whole process of selection wasn't created by a greater being (I mean, these types of beings are supposed to be rather intelligent, right?). Remember that at one point in time the Catholic Church condemned and excommunicated (even killed in some instances) people who believed that the sun is the center of the Universe. Modern day Christians, however, have no problems believing this. Things change and in 100 years people will be saying, damn, these people were considered radicals and blasphemous by the Christian Churches? HA HA HA.
I believe 2 monkeys can do the same job in half the time.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
Slashdotting (silencing) a poetry site, sounds like poetry to me.
... and we all know how well that worked out. Yeah, I know the process is a little different, but the notion that art can come from voting is as silly as thinking democracy pushes the best leaders to the top.
Murphy was an optimist.
can anyone tell me the Prose and Cons of Darwinian Poetry? :P
Join the TWIT army now!
eventually poems will have sex on /. about it. woah
Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming use the principles of natural selection to evolve solutions to problems that hopefully get better and better.
Dadaism "A western European artistic and literary movement (1916-23) that sought the discovery of authentic reality through the abolition of traditional culture and aesthetic forms."
Here is an example Dadaist poem -
People who can't develop a taste
for the primeval
but rather wrangle in this world
and in their noseless faces
daily brush and paint and lacquer
three abundant heraldic
stylized moustaches
one above another.
Now, let's find something in between, jwz has just done that - DADADO..
DadaDodo is a program that analyses texts for word probabilities, and then generates random sentences based on that. Sometimes these sentences are nonsense; but sometimes they cut right through to the heart of the matter, and reveal hidden meanings.
---
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
I'll bet that "have sex" link on the right side will be seeing some action...
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Which is fantastic, because then we can beat the monkeys senseless when they hit arbitrary keys we don't like.
I want that job.
1) Why did Slashdot reject me when I submitted this myself a couple of days ago? 2) The poor little Pentium 600 hosting this has already succumbed. Alas. (I can still ftp in, but Tomcat doesn't seem to like the load.) Donations for a real computer...like a Mac G5...will be graciously accepted. --David
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
From what I've read, the only evolutionary reason to have sex is protection against other organisms. Here, we don't need to do that. Of course, I could be wrong, but that's what I've read. If anyone has a better explanation for sex, please let me know.
Either way, in this circumstance, it completely fucks up the poem, so we might want to do without it.
To qoute; The goal of this project is to see if non-negotiated collaboration can evolve interesting poetry using (un)natural selection.
Darwinism is all to do with natural selection, while this is un-natural selection. It's about breeding poems, nothing more. That aside, I must say I find the idea interesting, and the end result can't be worse than what a lot of modern poets spew out (these days, it seems like "art" is defined as what the selfproclaimed artist manages to sell).
For a true darwinistic approach thought, it ought to be possible do analyze a heapload of poems written by humans, derive a handfull of rules as to what defines a 'good' poem (lenght, avrage lenght of words etc etc etc) and write a program that 'culls the herd' strickly on basis of those rules, ie: the 50% of the population which come closest to fullfilling the rules (best adapted to their enviromant) are allowed to breed and give rise to the next geneartion, at which point the process repeats.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
O freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me...
/. is telling me something, in the releated links box
"have sex".
Yeap, will do!
Machines can't make poetry (yet) because they don't have any grasp of meaning. Manipulating words using some vagrant Markov process blown through a rhymer doesn't make poetry - it just makes rhyming nonsense.
Of course, now, my cake is melting in the rain, and it took so long to bake it...
T'UFF UM - I ZIMBRA!
RS
If it isn't self refuting, it isn't complete.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
--David
Darwinian Poetry
Code as Art:Poetry:Darwinian Poetry
Generations (Avg)4.502 Total Number of Poems6969 Top Ranked Poems#2496 where ghost sleuth with lingo
of the long with helicopt bodies
where eyes tore devilish covered
#4951 your victims come
#1486 when sometime the life loved
to be throne revoking of shield in blood
#4722 secretiveness her to sins even
send it and woe to
#4808 though eyes closed
helmets stood not
#2216 gone to signify when terribly
untidily of whom suffered him
the come befool in kissing onside he mere
fluidic of her fleetest yet
#861 of either to forgo conclusions
seen reordered hosts my to
tend of me his footprints
but infest lost people lies
#3054 when sometime the life loved
to be throne revoking of shield in blood
#4257 went here bisecting splendid lists
blood of quieting tressed
prince held by posers blood
slumber secretion drink in scene
#4578 into the the lightning divide which
bolstering through stricter
lies
Total Hits76146
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
All I have to do is try to try to post something, anything and I'm fucked. Is that the same as sex?
This is a much better (read faster) version of an exercise we were made to do in junior high school english.
We all had to write the beginning, middle and end of three poems - about whatever we liked in whatever format we chose. Then we had to put them together with other part-poems from our classmates.
First we put all the beginnings in one box, the middles in another and the ends in another and randomly withdrew one sheet of paper from each.
Then we had another go where we forgot about whether each part was a beginning, a middle or an end and we selected the best partner to any given sheet. Having stuck the part-poems together, now in a whole pile of pairs we randomly paired them again.
It was a fun week of classes though I don't remember any particularly stellar results.
In all likelihood they will both be abysmal pieces of nonsensical garbage. That's ok. All you have to do is read them both and pick the one you find more appealing, for whatever reason. Your decision might be based on a single word that you happen to like. It doesn't matter. Just pick whichever one strikes your fancy.
/. moderation guidelines?
I like it!
Could somebody please add this to the
Oh, wait...
TC - My Photos..
No, it's human interpretation the makes something poetry.
Computers/processes are quite capable of producing works we percieve as art.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
You seem to think that it isn't 'natural' selection if humans pick the poems. But there is nothing wrong with having humans do it. In fact, it's the most interesting thing they could do with this. The evolutionary environment, in this case, is determined by many human minds. This psychosphere or whatever you want to call it is unpredictable and dangerous, just like real jungles.
i took an e-poetry class for a literature requirement and created a similar project....
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~dblaze/hex/
it is pretty much the same thing but done in a somewhat short amount of time.
I don't know about the rest of you, but i just clicked on "have sex" straightaway. I don't even know what the article is about yet, I just opened it in a new Safari tab to type this while it loaded.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
(Who needs a body ?)
Or not at all.
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Slashdot zoot Day Slashdot
www.slashdot.net Apple zoot Slashdot: that jazzman jazzy Apple
stuff cool that
long gone jazzy long gone
Slashdot matters that Apple cool
cool Slashdot: that Games Meetup
International hip cool News stuff matters
nerds, Quit hepcat Quit Games hepcat Apple cool
Meetup News matters jazzman
Well, I'd like to say I was able to look at the site...but I haven't found a way to resolve this problem where I install the java jre plugin in mozilla, and it starts crashing left and right when visiting pages with java.
Anyone know of a way to fix that? Flash, etc... works fine. Just Java crashes. (BTW, this is Mozilla on Linux (slackware 9 to be exact).
Typing away with one hand and fapping away with the other.
are the frequency of voting and the degree to which the democracy is indirect.
When democracy is direct and frequent it tends to work pretty well (eg Slashdot moderation).
When it is infrequent (vote every X years) and/or indirect (you vote for someone, who then represents you when voting) it becomes less effective.
As far as the best leaders not getting to the top the problem isn't democracy, the problem is that there isn't enough democracy.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I see two possible designs: One is to evolve many simple, deterministic algorithms which produce one poem when run. This is most similar to what Darwinian Poetry does, evolving individual poems. The other approach is to evolve a smaller population of algorithms with access to an entrophy source, which produces many different poems. I think the latter approach would lead to machines with a basic, ingrained understanding of what makes a good poem.
So what I'd do is make virtual machine, neural network, or cellular automata, with access to a random number generator, which somehow outputs indexes into a word list. Each time the page reloads, two machines from the population would be run, and their output presented, and the user would select the best one.
Unless the algorithm allows for the individuals to understand what they write, it's little more than a bunch of random paragraphs moderated by a bunch of random people. Hmm.
Litigious bastards
Evolution is a religion. It is a set of beliefs. Most evolutionists say things like "we have reason to believe", or "we believe that foo is x years old". It is still called a "theory", not a proven fact or scientific Law. Actually it is mathematically improbable even. Just like the early church, the evolution religion changes its views on matters of "fact" and change the timeline and tree of life to fit in with their new findings. Those who don't adhere to the beliefs are excommunications and sometimes attacked and discredited. Just ask any creationist with a Ph.D.
How so? It seems rather obvious that the parent got FP (Fr0sty P1ss)
so, seems to me that this will just end up selecting the "fittest," where "fittest" is that which the vast majority of people find pleasing... this seems like a definite disconnect from what is "good" poetry.
:)
it would be funny if this ended up generating britney spears songs after a million generations or whatever
had ogden nash read this tale of digital darwinery
he surely would have lost his wits.. then retired to a whinery
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I don't think this is guided in the breeding sense. If you breed something you have a concrete goal, a certain colour fur, increased longevity.
In this case the criteria for selection are not defined. Intelligence may play a part in an individual selection but the environment the poems live in is not directed by any one intelligence.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
About six years ago I had a group of high school students generate Haiku through random selection. It was quite a bit of fun for them. The highlight being when they took their favorite poems and read them before an open mic poetry night.
The goal was to see if poetry could be generated from totally random means (well, a shaken coffee can) the selection being letters->syllables->words->17 syllable sentences. There was no human selection (to negate the argument from design).
In any case, the audience was receptive and thought that the poetry had been "designed". The kids got the point. And Richard Dawkins had some nice things to say too.
do not a poem make.
Probability is a deceptive thing, because although a million monkeys with typewriters will eventually write Shakespeare, it's just a theoretical probability which is different to an actual likelyhood.
This is the nature of "np-hard" problems (as I believe they're called) - you can't beat the odds.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
no, it's not a religion. It might be /like/ one - you give e.g. for that. But any arbitrary set of beliefs does not make a religion.
Yes, it still is just a "theory" - but there's enough proof out there that the only good reason to disbelieve it is as a thought experiment.
> Evolution is a religion. It is a set of beliefs.
I believe the sun will rise tomorrow just about the same time it rose today; is that also a religion?
> Most evolutionists say things like "we have reason to believe", or "we believe that foo is x years old". It is still called a "theory", not a proven fact or scientific Law. Actually it is mathematically improbable even.
Actually, if you put imperfect replicators in a rich environment evolution is almost a certainty.
> Just like the early church, the evolution religion changes its views on matters of "fact" and change the timeline and tree of life to fit in with their new findings.
That's a Prime Directive for science: if your model doesn't fit the facts, you have to keep the facts and change the model. That's how science makes progress.
> Those who don't adhere to the beliefs are excommunications and sometimes attacked and discredited. Just ask any creationist with a Ph.D.
That's not excommunication, that's "bullshit walks". Creationists are welcome to submit their articles to the same peer review process that real scientists are. How many do you know of that do so, and what were the reviewers' comments on the rejection notices?
Conspiracy theories are the last refuge of kooks.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
... poetry have sex with YOU!
...is that you have to have faith in a stochastic process.
Now, I haven't looked at their code, so I don't know what the selection fitness criteria are. Obviously humans play a part in selection for survival; selection for reproduction seems to be completely random -- and that's okay.
But, assuming that the selction mechanism isn't completely asswacked, I feel sure that some "good" poetry will be eventually produced. ("Good" in the eyes of the same people who made the selection choices, of course. If you never vote, you have no place to complain.) Why do I feel this?
Because I have faith in evolutionary programming. It's remarkably good at solving problems with a nonlinear fitness landscape. Finicky local minima, discontinuous fitness evaluation -- all that nasty stuff that kills traditional problem-optimization algorithms, and tends to show up in all the "interesting" problems -- genetic approaches are all over that stuff. It isn't completely random, of course, and that's the saving grace. That's the part that we have faith in.
Yes, as you say, two good poems interchanged at random snip points will statistically be likely to become bad poems. But bad poems die. (Again, assuming the selection mechanism isn't horked over by a sixth-grader who votes for anything containing the word "boobies" no matter how poor the poetry.) And there will be lots and lots of poems. Most of them will be bad. They die, and over time, eventually, statistically, the good ones gain an edge.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
... and I was studying to be a poet, driven by dreams of fame and fortune. "Learn Meter", my teacher told me, "understand the rhythm of the soul", he repeated as he hit me over the knuckles with a 2 by 4 when I miscounted my syllables. And now, after ten long years of poet school, I find that I have been replaced by a machine! Not any machine, even, but a mere Pentium 600!
Perhaps one day we will be able to meet, my machine opponent and I, for a final match. Yes, the machine has sex, and I have not, but I have drugs, and that is a lot. The crowd will decide: is poetry the expression of my purely human soul, or just (as I always suspected before my teacher beat the idea out of me) a jumble of pretty words?
Ceci n'est pas une signature
What would be good is is a collection of poems generated by this method could actually get published without anyone knowing their origin until afterward.
A lecturer got away with publishing a random garbage paper in a journal - the link below is from a social scientist but I remember some physicists doing the same thing - some paper about string theory, they put in a bunch of meaningless equations and it was published in a peer-reviewed journal!
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/
Cobralingus, by the british sci-fi author jeff noon (www.cobralingus.com) Text mutation engine, he wrote a whole book with it called Needle in the Groove, and parts of his collection of short stories Pixel Juice are written with it. Kinda fun to play with, but like the page posted it mostly constructs nonsense.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
This is all fun and games up to a certain point, but is it safe???
how does one change his
... Shouldn't it be the RULES used for generating poetry that should be altered rather than the poetry itself? Just like it's the human genotype rather than the phenotype which is subject to mutation and crossover.
... um, not that anyone actually wants more poetry.
Then, once your poetry generating algorithm was perfected, you could have all the poetry that you want.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
*snip from website*
Well, it's happened: I've been Slashdotted. Which I suppose is good news. But the poor little 600 mhz pentium under my desk hosting Darwinian Poetry can't handle the strain. Connectivity may be bad until the Slashdot crowd backs off. Sorry.
I respect their efforts, but their results (if any) are going to be inevitably flawed because of a basic mistake.
They are using intelligent workmanship as a source for their generator.
If, the evolutionary tale is true, and the first organism's and whatnot came to be after "Rain beat on the hot rocks for millions of years", then their generator would need a similar base of language to start out with. You cannot compare rain on rocks with tale's crafted by literary masters.
In order to improve their programs relevance to the actual beginnings of evolution, they should start their program up with nothing but letters, and let it make the words up as it goes along.
There's no way 'evolution' can form a poem, from the looks of it.
I suppose if you think that science is a religion, you could argue your points. However, the definition of religion I get in Meriam-Webster implies faith, which my Sunday school teacher always defined as belief without proof.
Now the idea of science as religion is not new. In fact, there is a nice bit about it in Contact by Carl Sagan, in which the religious guy tells the atheist that she believes in science and does a cool experiment with a Foucault pendulum.
The difference between science and religion is then not that they believe but what they believe. Everyone believes in something. That's what humans do. Science just attempts to get proof, while most religions (I would say all, but I don't know all religions) are characterised by the lack of proof.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
And people are worried about DoS attacks taking down big servers.... that is nothing compared to the almighty power of the Slashdot link.
in the colos of the night,
What immortal ping of DDOS
could crash thy fearful RAID array?
A happy Vogon, am I. Sorry, Blake.
Money for nothing, pix for free
bad to verse... oh, how we laughed!
magnifique!
\a
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
So lets say there a 100 turtles. One out of the 100 (and I am being generous) has a mutation. The probability that it is an improvement is extremely low as most mutations are errors in the gene pool and result in deformities rather than improvements.
Now being generous, lets say that this one turtle develops a good trait that the other don't have. For example better eye-sight, and extra leg, or an above average ability to withstand the climate of it's habitat.
Hmmm.... do you think that the one out of the 100 turtles is likely to have more advantage in procreation because of this new trait. I think not. The probability of the trait being diluted the procreation is higher than the probability of the trait spreading to the rest of the species. I mean, sheessh he gotta do it with dang near all of em lady turtle to pass on this gene, for this trait to survive. His new leg or eyesight is not going to make him a Don Juan or something. Sure he might survive a little longer then the average.
now that it's been /.ed, i'll bet we will slightly skew the results for the "good" words and "bad" words.
i can see it now.
"We have noticed a 400% increase in the number of poems created including penguins and oddly enough, the letter 'C'".
Let's just say the stories about him are greatly exaggerated.
Brocklesby Park Cricket Club
Every they type nonsense they get slapped until
they come up with a version that ressembles
Hamlet.
--- Eat my sig.
Anyone reminded of Vogon poetry?
> I believe the sun will rise tomorrow just about the same time it rose today; is that also a religion?
No, that is one belief that is assumed based on experience. It does not break a scientific law whereas evolution breaks the scientific law that each produces its own kind.
> Actually, if you put imperfect replicators in a rich environment evolution is almost a certainty.
Yes, but is this microevolution which is proven and easily demonstrated, or macroevolution, which is what the debate is over?
> That's not excommunication, that's "bullshit walks". Creationists are welcome to submit their articles to the same peer review process that real scientists are. How many do you know of that do so, and what were the reviewers' comments on the rejection notices?
By referring to people who believe one thing as "real scientists" you have just excomunicated them, yourself. This is precisely what he means. Papers referring to intelligent design are mocked in peer review because they do not think of such as "real science." You have just given an excellent case in point.
> Conspiracy theories are the last refuge of kooks.
By saying this, I am assuming you would be referring to people who believe in any sort of intelligent design as conspiracy theorists and kooks as well. Interesting. This again, shows why the creationists or even scientists with any belief in intelligent design find it hard to publish papers: their ideas are shoved aside or pre-conceived as as kooky before even being looked at.
-st
Absurd! It's an obvious fact that these poems were intelligently created! They even violate the seventh law of ther-moo-dinamiks!
We characterize things by a lack of proof on a daily basis. I personally have never been to New York City. I think that it exists. I believe that it exists. I believe so, because I have talked to people who claim to have been there. I have seen pictures of it. But because I have never been there, I cannot be absolutely sure if it exists. Therefore, through faith, i believe that New York City exists.
So if faith is just something used to define religion (believing without proof), then we live by faith daily, and our whole existence is a religion. As to how this relates to Evolution / religious beliefs concerning beginnings: Nobody was there when it happened. I have yet to see a new species (note: not new adaptation of existing species) emerge. Therefore, to believe either of these, we must believe so on a notion of faith that it happened in that way.
By referring to people who believe one thing as "real scientists" you have just excomunicated them, yourself. This is precisely what he means. Papers referring to intelligent design are mocked in peer review because they do not think of such as "real science." You have just given an excellent case in point.
I'm a scientist. The reason I have a problem with the idea of "Intelligent Design" is that it doesn't have predictive power. Science is all about explaining what's going on in the universe - and the main way we test whether we understand something or not is to use a theory we've developed based one one set of evidence to make predictions about experiments we haven't tried yet.
Evolution has passed the test of time because it explains the existing data and one can make predictions based on it that tend to be surprisingly true.
Intelligent Design is one equally valid way to explain the existing data. But by definition it doesn't give us any idea about what to predict regarding new data. It in effect tells us "stop trying to understand it, it's like this because somebody made it this way".
I'm open-minded enough to entertain the possibility that there might be a Creator who designed all of the creatures on the Earth. But there sure is a lot of evidence that says that the creatures evolved, and are continuing to evolve, and in quite dramatic ways over enormous timescales.
Not true.
Lately it is becoming clear that sexual selection is playing a much greater part than previously thought. In fact, Darwin himself had this in his work, but was largely ignored later, probably because it was about sex.
It is logical. To have children, you must both survive AND reproduce. In the second part of this, the largest influence in your success is in the hands (or better say minds) of the opposite sex. The human instance of your opposite sex does have intelligence (although it often does not look so.)
There is also an excellent theory that says that, in fact, the human mind itself is a product of sexual selection, and this nicely explains humor, art, poetry, language, as those are all things that attract us to the opposite sex.
Also, if you actually take a look at the situation of humans, including most intelligent animals, the biggest competition comes not from some random environmental factors, but from the members of your own species. You compete against other guys for sex. Even survival itself is not "intelligence free", as some of your predators can be, and usually are, intelligent.
I recommend those two books on this topic: "Mating Mind" and "Red Queen".
now go play soldier of fortune you heretic!
Machine9dotNet
The story in which Trurl builds an electropoet is possibly my second favorite Lem story (after the one about the machine which did Nothing)
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
> > I believe the sun will rise tomorrow just about the same time it rose today; is that also a religion?
> No, that is one belief that is assumed based on experience. It does not break a scientific law whereas evolution breaks the scientific law that each produces its own kind.
That's not a scientific law; that's the Neolithic belief enshrined in Genesis. The actual science pertaining to reproduction is - you guessed it! - evolution.
BTW, it's really funny to see evolution deniers try to reject science on the basis of scientific law. Are you unaware that all those "laws of nature" come from the same place that evolution does, namely from observing how nature actually operates?
No scientist things evolution violates any natural laws, but even if they did it would not be a foregone conclusion that evolution would be the one that got thrown out. When two parts of the scientific model of the universe are found to be in conflict we simply have to see which one has the best empirical support.
> > Actually, if you put imperfect replicators in a rich environment evolution is almost a certainty.
> Yes, but is this microevolution which is proven and easily demonstrated, or macroevolution, which is what the debate is over?
Macroevolution is just the end result of lots of microevolution. Evolution deniers are fond of claiming that there's some sort of glass ceiling that limits how far from home base you can get with iterative microevolution, but for some reason they're completely incapable of supporting that arbitrary claim. (Which, BTW, has no motivation and serves no purpose except for denying evolution.) On the contrary, huge piles of genetic and morphological evidence suggest that iterative microevolution explains the tree of life.
> > That's not excommunication, that's "bullshit walks". Creationists are welcome to submit their articles to the same peer review process that real scientists are. How many do you know of that do so, and what were the reviewers' comments on the rejection notices?
> By referring to people who believe one thing as "real scientists" you have just excomunicated them, yourself. This is precisely what he means.
I'm not excluding them; they're excluding themselves by not doing real science.
(Actually there are lots of creationists who do do real science, but for some reason they only do it in fields other than creation.)
> Papers referring to intelligent design are mocked in peer review because they do not think of such as "real science."
I rather suspect you don't have the faintest idea what feedback the authors of ID papers get from peer reviewers, because as far as I know none have ever been submitted to a scientific journal. (If you can name one that has and quote exactly what the reviewers wrote about it, it would help your credibility immensely.)
I take that back; I think Nature let the leading ID "researchers" have their say in an issue a year or so back, for the sole purpose of refuting their claims of persecution. But notice that that wasn't the result of passing any kind of peer review.
> > Conspiracy theories are the last refuge of kooks.
> By saying this, I am assuming you would be referring to people who believe in any sort of intelligent design as conspiracy theorists and kooks as well.
No, just those like the earlier poster who attribute the rejection of their ideas to a conspiracy rather than to the glaring shortcomings of the ideas.
> Interesting. This again, shows why the creationists or even scientists with any belief in intelligent design find it hard to publish papers: their ideas are shoved aside or pre-conceived as as kooky before even being looked at.
Again, except for what I mentioned above I'm not aware that any ID papers have even been submitted for publication. It's kind of hard to reject something due to biases
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You can find examples of Cope/EMI compositions in MIDI and PDF format here.
Cope has written extensively about EMI in Computers and Musical Style and Experiments in Musical Intelligence. In the second volume, he includes a "mini" version of EMI called Sara, which is written in LISP and will run on a Mac. You can also find the source here.
Sara works by reassembling works of a composer to form new works. Basically, Cope "distills" a composer's work by simplifying the texture, changing the key, and doing other things that make it more amenable to recomposition.
Then the work is fed into Sara, which analyzes each bar based on harmonic function, melodic function, and so on. These analyzed chunks are then stored in a database.
To "recompose" a work, Sara picks a composition to use as the base. It then replaces each bar in the composition with a functionally equivalent bar from the database, based on harmonic function, melodic direction, and so on. The result is a composition which follows the same general contours of the original work, but has a different melody, texture, and often changed harmony - yet still follows the same stylistic rules of the composer.
EMI is significantly more powerful than Sara. At it's core is a rules-based composition engine, which can generate proper - and perhaps a bit bland - compositions in many styles following music compositional rules. For example, it can even generate a 'proper' four part fugue. EMI's pattern matcher is more sophisticated than Sara's, and EMI is much more subtle in how it weaves a composer's work into it's own. It's even difficult for Cope to tell where the material comes from.
EMI was written primarily to help Cope through a writer's block, and in The Algorithmic Composer he details Alice (ALgorithmically Integrated Composing Environment), yet another incarnation of EMI, which functions as a composer's assistance (included with the text).
Cope is an excellent author, and he makes much of his work understandable to people without a degree in Music Composition or Artificial Intelligence. He's is quite willing to acknowledge and discuss the shortcomings of his programs. In a field where some people consider using fractals as "composition" because the results resemble music, Cope has managed to create something that not only "resembles" music - it's fooled a lot of experts, too.
That's quite a feat.
While not exactly a replacement of our DNA, Mitocondria is effectively an insertion in eukaryotic cells that in effect, help them win the "contest" of efficient ATP production. So insert that sonnet. The 18th has always helped
me get sex.
> > By referring to people who believe one thing as "real scientists" you have just excomunicated them, yourself. This is precisely what he means. Papers referring to intelligent design are mocked in peer review because they do not think of such as "real science." You have just given an excellent case in point.
> I'm a scientist. The reason I have a problem with the idea of "Intelligent Design" is that it doesn't have predictive power. Science is all about explaining what's going on in the universe - and the main way we test whether we understand something or not is to use a theory we've developed based one one set of evidence to make predictions about experiments we haven't tried yet.
Another useful way of understanding "Intelligent Design" is to look at what real scientists do, look at what traditional creationists do, and then look to see which pattern the IDers follow most closely.
As you say, science is all about explaining what we see in the universe. That's why we have all those theories that creationists are so fond of dismissing as "just theories".
Creationism OTOH explains nothing. The only "science" creationists try to do is try to poke holes in the theory of evolution (or geology, or cosmology) in order to make the universe safe for their god.
And that's exactly what the ID "researchers" do as well. They spend their time looking for arguments that "evolution couldn't have done that, therefore an intelligent designer was involved". Ignore the gross non sequitur for now, and concentrate on the fact that once they have launched such an argument they are done with it. There is absolutely no attempt to explain this amazing discovery; in fact they take care to innoculate it against further investigation by claiming that the nature of the designer and the mechanism of design are neither knowable nor interesting. This is the very antithesis of science; you don't have be expert enough to spot the flaws in their arguments in order to be able to recognize that they aren't "real scientists", because they simply aren't doing real science.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
what the fuck are you talking about
Well, two very successful species are the Norway Maple and the Norway rat. Let's try crossing them ....
Since the site is slashdotted, I don't know, but it seems to me the experiment is doomed unless poems are constrained to mate with nearly identical poems. Otherwise you're likely to do the equivalent of mating cats with yeast.
In fact, I expect that to work you'd have to start with a limited number of something like "bacterial poems" and allow them to acquire complexity through mutation and mating. However, it would take so many generations to produce large, complex poems people would probably lose interest.
Perhaps a better approach would be to start with a single human generated poem of moderate length and undoubted mediocrity. There are a number of poets who have been popular in their day and have subsequently been relegated to history's aesthetic dustbin, for example Abraham Cowley. These would provide a rich source of mediocre starting material. Then see if they coudl be improved by a process of random mutation, mating, and viral infection.
Chances are any experiment like this will meet with some success, given the human mind's tendency to find patterns and meaning in everything. The difference is that in real poems there is a human imagination at the bottom of them, which makes them communication.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As each verbal evolutionary contest ends in a single, 'highlander' word, the list of winners, paired with definitions, must be a dictionary... /.ed. Oops.
I would see what the original article was about, but it is, of course,
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
As you say, science is all about explaining what we see in the universe
Well then what is the difference between science, religion and philosophy?
The difference, in my opinion, is that in science you can measure what we can see in the universe and prove theories wrong. The only explaining power of science is in the theories which may be created by any means from intuition to coin tossing. The scientific part is predicting data from the theory and then measure some real data and see if the theory stands the test. Even if the theory explains some data-set it is in no way a guarantee that the theory is true, because the underlying real reason might just give similar output for the measured data-set.
Therefore science does not explain anything, it works through disproving, not proving. So whatever the motivation is, there is certainly nothing wrong with "poking holes" into theories from a scientific point of view. If there is, then the theory has become religion.
The end result being a poem is known from the start.
Get a free ipod.
can't be much worse than goth poetry.
that's it.
pay attention. that wons on the house.
consult with/trust yOUR creator. vote with yOUR wallet. that's the spirit.
the lessons will be repeated until they are learned.
failure to begin to understand the near-term heat build-up (greed/fear/baby killing, etc..) will result in unimaginable disaster. it's yOUR call.
There's a catch --- the evolution requires a certain amount of consistency in the criteria, used for selection (ie. your offspring will probably live in an environment similar to the one you live in).
This is not true with the poems.
If most of the ``selectors'' (the people representing the cruel nature) kept coming back without changing the criteria, that would be different. Unfortunately this is probably not the case with Slashdotters.
creations with Ph.D's!? sounds unlikely dont they just have shotguns on racks in their pickups?
It seems, essentially, like trying to brute force a password. I know that the revolutionary concept is that we gradually move toward the 'correct' answer -- but we still know that 99,999 out of 100,000 will be wrong. And with poems, that will apply even right up to the end, because a good poem mated with another good poem is still likely to be garbage.
With cracking passwords, we don't ask 'is it possible?' but 'how long will it take?' So a better question than 'is it theoretically possible to get a good poem' would be 'how many page views will we need to get a good poem?'
Keeping in mind that this thing seems to be running on a DSL line, I'm afraid it may be a bit too many. Are there ways to estimate that number?
Be careful with what you say about "poking holes" in other theories. Creationists and ID "researchers" are not the only one that do this. In Hawkings "A Brief History of Time" he refers to "real" scientists who when the Catholic Church decided that the big bang theory was in accordance with the bible attempted to find another theory to explain the origins of the universe just because they wanted to "poke holes" in a religion. They ultimately failed and conceded but the point is that they were "poking holes" in something to tear it down not to try and prove their own point.
Of course this will work, but all it will prove is something we've known for a couple of thousand years: Selective breeding will bring out desired characteristics.
What this study does NOT address:
Irreducible complexity. We already have the groups of words. Well, where did they come from? How do we get the group of words in the first place? We can't do selection on the words until we have the words, so, how do we get the words?
Intelligent design. Intelligence (namely the humans running the model) is determining what we start with and is determining what the desired results (what constitutes acceptable survival),
Cost of mutation. There is no attempt to factor in mutational "drag" if you will. All mutations are either considered neutral, or beneficial. The reality is, most mutations are HARMFUL. Any mutation which does not directly improve the organism, will almost certainly harm the organism, greatly increasing its chance of death. If the mutation rate is too high, the species will die out (known as Haldane's dilemna).
Informational Loss. Nearly all mutations result in a LOSS of information, in this case, the elimination of a word. Once the word is gone, how will it ever come back?
So, this little exercise is nothing more than a cute gimmick that blind adherents to evolution as the source of all life will point to, smile, and say: See you idiot creationists, one more thing to prove your stupid, unthinking mindset wrong.
But the reality is, it won't prove or demonstrate anything other than the time-tested truism that trial and error will eventually get you what you want.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Sorry, I guess I didn't express myself very well in my post. Science also uses indirect proof. I have seen pictures of New York. I have actually been to New York and am now telling you I saw it.
If you want to get all philosophical about it, we can argue about the existance of existance all we want and still just be convinced that we can think but not much else. That's all semantics. Science seeks proof of all theories, and if new facts come to light that contradict the theory it is refined or discarded.
So, inasmuch nothing in this world is provable beyond doubt (are you dreaming right now/are you in the Matrix/have you been hypnotised or conditioned to see things that do not exist?) everything is about faith. Some proof is just a tad more believable to most people than others. And religious faith is about belief without any proof.
Think about it this way: God asks us to believe. It should be simple for him to prove his existance, but he chooses not to, because belief in New York just does not require as much faith as belief in a Being we cannot see.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
Vhat did you say?
"Well, it's happened: I've been Slashdotted. Which I suppose is good news. But the poor little 600 mhz pentium under my desk hosting Darwinian Poetry can't handle the strain. Connectivity may be bad until the Slashdot crowd backs off. Sorry."
God asks us to believe
Nobody consulted me on this one.
Well then what is the difference between science, religion and philosophy?
In my opinion all 3 are the same, but for different areas. If you think about it, what dose science explain? Science is all about the physical world, what we see, touch, ext.
OTOH religion is perfectly equipped to explain things of the soul, and one could argue that philosophy is a discipline of our mind. The problem comes when people try to use religion, to explain the physical world.
For each of us the world is created when we are born. things that happened before you were born don't seem as real as thows that happen during your lifetime, even thow you may have no more connection w/ them. In this sense creationism explains how we feel about the world perfectly, it seem like it was put their and only started moving for us. Trying to turn this into a scientific reality is a great way to appear a fool...
Don't save your orgasms for Heaven; Heaven knows we need them here.
Initially, the snippets remind me of unedited "l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e" poetry from the late '80s, but I suspect they'll be verging towards formal and stylistic standards like R.Frost or ee cummings, since that's what people got in school (and usually remember). I don't have faith that this will wind up with anything like the avant-garde direction that the newness of the generation technique suggests is possible.
There's a good tradition of last century's poets experimenting with generation techniques. Bryan Gyson and William Burroughs played with cutups, and someone's even automated the process with TextBlender Pro (disclaimer: haven't tried this one). I had a gas with this idea, and once had a month off so sequestered myself with a typewriter (yeah I'm getting old) and source texts by Buckminster Fuller, Nietzche, Attar, and some histories of WW2, in order to generate some centos for fun and non-profit (never published, needless to say).
William Carlos Williams claimed that poetry is a word machine:
- To make two bold statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.
Anyway, the Darwinian P. reports indicate that the process has a long way to go. So what will literary critics (before their descent into hell) claim about the validity and category of these poems? Is it just one more disintegration of the canon that comes with the post-post-modern post mortem? Will the poems stand the test of seven layers of meaning? O machine, wax!Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. From: Williams's introduction to The Wedge, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams
Damn those pesky terrorists
That post said "boobies"! Mod it up!
"...Cull the prosaic or nonsensical snippets of text, reinforce the rest, and, slowly... genius?"
Um, that would be genus.
That's a scarey thought.
I'm imagining you see the scenario something like this.
Vogon1: Sir, we seem to be picking up a broadcast indicating intelligent live in sector 3.
Vogon2: Excellent, post the coordinates to the internal network, let's see if anyone else has found this before.
Vogon1: Sir, I'm not getting any historical hits, looks like this is a first post.
Vogon2: Change our course so we can go take a look.
Vogon1: Sir, seems there was a hacker in the network, he's posted the coordinates to a public net, Stabcomma.universe
Vogon2: Shit, belay the course redirection. By the time we get there those younger technogeeks will have probed everyone and eaten all the cows. You just know they are going to ruin all the parking by leaving donuts in the fields.
--
One of the writers over at OuterLimits or TwilightZone should do something with this...
The Day The Earth Was Slashdotted!
The Sex life of an Electron
by Eddie Currents
One night when his charge was pretty high, Micro-Farad decided to seek out a cute little coil to help him discharge.
He picked up Milli-Amp and took her for a ride in his Megacycle. They rode across the Wheatstone Bridge and stopped by a Magnetic field with flowing currents and frolicked in the sine waves.
Micro-Farad, attracted by Millie-Amp's characterisic curves soon had her fully charged and proceeded to excite her resistance to a minimum. He gently laid her at ground potential, raised her frequency and lowered her reluctance.
With a quick arc, he pulled out his high voltage probe and inserted it in her socket, connecting them in parallel. He slowly began short circuiting her resistance shunt while quickly raising her thermal conductance level to mil-spec. Fully excited, Milli- Amp mumbled "MHO...MHO...MHO"
With his tube operating well into class C, and her field vibrating with his current flow, a corona formed which instantly caused her shunt to overheat just at the point when Micro-Farad rapidly discharged and drained off every electron into her grid.
They fluxed all night trying various connectors and sockets untill his magnet had a soft core and lost all of its field strength.
Afterwards, Milli-Amp tried self-induction and damaged her solenoids and with his battery fully discharged, Micro-Farad was unable to excite his field. Not ready to be quiescent, they spent the rest of the evening reversing polarity and blowing each others fuses.
Anyway, that's one motivation for bad poetry, the other major one is the one that effectively applies here - just wanting to get laid.
Or philosophers. Consider -
They argue over what the meaning of 'is' is.
They conclude the existence of objects from nothing more than argument, without the requirement of physical proof
They debate and challenge every single day the major question 'What is Truth?'
They have mastered the art of believing two completely contradictory ideas at the same time
Has the word "Oh" in it!
Are you trying to tell us that mitosis is a violation of the DMCA, but meiosis isn't?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Some /. readers are in their 40's, perhaps even older.
Some of us are married and have families.
Some of us get quite a bit of sex, even after marriage.
Nyaah, Nyaah!
OTOH, now it's time to worry about making sure my kids NOT having sex, at least not yet. Especially my daughter, maybe it's time to take a lesson from ESR and buy a gun. Maybe I can just threaten potential suitors with High Voltage.
Burroughs also used to talk about language as "the word virus", which seems to be exactly what we have here! Say what you want about Burroughs, he was ahead of his time.
Interestingly enough, prior to the whole "theory of evolution" thing catching on, the Darwin family already had a claim to fame. Erasmus Darwin, Chuck's father (or was it grandfather?) was a moderately successful poet. A lot of his stuff is reportedly pretty lewd too. So I guess this stuff is just coming full-circle in a weird sort of way.
-Lux
I always wondered how prog rock bands (especially the earlier ones) came up with their lyrics. And folks say it was the LDS^H^H^H LSD. John Anderson was obviously a man before his time!
:)
And Yes, I am a prog rock fan.
So far the first four pairs I've seen all could pass, more or less (and definitely on the less side of things) as prog rock lyrics.
That's what inspired Alan Sokal to submit a spoof of that garbage to Social Text as genuine. Scroll to the top of Sokal's page and you'll find a link to elsewhere.org's Postmodern Generator!
In other words...
It's a nice proof-of-concept on the programming/humour side, but of little value for Literature essays."
Yes, the poems actually have sex.
For a second there, I thought it said the poets.
This Like That - fun with words!
The Darwinian poetry can be pretty bad. But it doesn't hold a candle to the Bulwer-Lytton price winners given every year for the most gawdawful first sentence of an as-yet-and-we-hope-forever unwritten novel.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Ahh, but you see, to the philosopher, empirical "proof" is the concern of epistemology, and an epistemological theory can be side swiped by other branches of philosophy.
Did anyone note the recent disclaimer at the bottom of his incredibly awesomely designed page? The modem next to that poor 600MHz isn't going to stop blinking for awhile.
Yes. At least I'm seriously questioning whether it did. /.
This is oft debated and this post will probably re-ignite the old Evolutionist vs Creationist flamefest. Oh well. This is
DNA would appear to contain some kind of language describing genes and stuff. The physical medium, dioxyribonucleic acid (sp?) needs the language, but the language needs the physical medium. Which came first?
It still puzzles me. I am not a biology expert.
Attributing it to intelligent design raises thornier issues though - such as who is the designer and who designed the designer.
Feel free to continue this thread in my journal to avoid a lengthy OT thread.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
... first, take a lump of marble and a chisel - then chisel away anything that doesn't resemble an elephant.
How to make a poem - first, take a bunch of words, then chisel away any words that aren't poetry.
This Darwin poem engine is like the lump of marble. It is the readers who chisel away non-poems who are the artists. Their chisels are the voting buttons with which they chisel away anything that does not resemble an elephant^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H poem.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
Judging by your spelling, you must own a pickup with a shotgun rack.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
True rednecks keep the shotguns under the seat, and have fishing poles in the gunrack.
I managed a high A on a test over an entire book (Pride and Prejudice) that I never read. Hit Spark Notes the night before, problem solved. Ironically, my buddy that actually read (and hated) it got a C. He hasn't read anything for an English class since.
Never mistake "can" for "should".