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.
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
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