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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.
It's still up, and still fast!
Anyway, I hope people of realised this is nothing to do with proper evolution. If this were to be proper evolution then the ability to write poems would be codified in the genes, and that would be crossed over and mutated. This is simply single poems that are being selected between. Therefore you could 'cheat' by simply inserting a Shakespearian sonnet into the gene pool, and it would be guaranteed to win every comparison. You can't inject "the ability to write Shakespearian sonnets" into the former gene pool because we don't know how to codify how to write such poems, and indeed that would be a far more interesting behaviour to try and evolve than just a single poem, which teaches us _nothing_.
I much prefer the evolutionary art page, as at least there you were evolving algorithms. I have no longer if that page still exists, I last looked there in about 1994.
Sorry to be so negative, but any old nonsense that breeds and is selected is called 'evolution' nowadays, which cheapens the concept.
YAW.
Your head of state is a corrupt weasel, I hope you're happy.
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
Not only is poetry machine driven. Take a look at This Post-Modern Research Paper Generator.
Go ahead and read it...It looks just like the garbage I had to read and write in college...
Then hit the reload/refresh button.
More useless machine driven garbage.
As an added bonus, If you are in college and you need to impress that good looking Literature TA...then print off a copy. She'll never know.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
Maybe it's not "inspired" poetry, but it is an interesting experiment, nonetheless. If people moderating "generations" of peoms, can produce something that people would be interested in... well then it's good poetry, regardless of it's origins.
I remember reading a few years ago about a pogram that was written to randomly write music in the style of certain composers (in this case, Bach and Mozart). Then as an experiment, they held a concert for music scholars. This concert had three pieces played: a very obscure piece by Bach (which is easy to find, since his repetiore has well over 1000), a piece written by someone in the style of Bach, and a piece generated by this program in the style of Bach. Then they were asked to guess which piece was the one composed by Bach....and as I'm sure you guessed, the computer generated one was the winner.
If I can find a link, I will post it, but this was a few years ago.
It's a noble experiment, I think, and not something that should be immediatly shunned just because it wasn't written by humans.
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
I like the front page:
System Requirements
None. Well, a computer and a browser. Any browser. Netscape, IE, Safari, Opera, whatever. It could be NCSA Mosaic on a 386, GistIt on your Blackberry, or Lynx on a VT100 terminal. (Or, as I've just been informed by a reader, WAP on your cell phone.) Pure HTML, baby. Javascript is for sissies and posers.
I found the meaning of life the other day, but I had write-only access.
But it isn't natural selection if the selection is made by a sentinent beeing. By your logic, you might as well call the process that took a wolf (a wild predator, beutyfully fit to savagly tear elks into tiny bits) and turned it into a chihuahua (a teeny little thing most suited to be put out of it's misery) for a natural selection.
My statement stands. Evolution is unguided by intelligence, breeding is guided. Thus, this page of poems has nothing to do with evolution, and all to do with breeding. Off course, the end result is dependent on the first generation (just as you can say that the chihuahua exists in potentia in the genes of the wolf), but that don't turn the process into something it is not.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
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.
I remember reading a few years ago about a pogram that was written to randomly write music in the style of certain composers (in this case, Bach and Mozart)....
It's a noble experiment, I think, and not something that should be immediatly shunned just because it wasn't written by humans.
Oh, but it was written by humans! Just not directly. A human had to take the time, and develop some sort of algorithm for determining what comprises a "Bach" piece of literature.
Humans then had to encode this - had to develop the intimate understanding of what it means to be "Bach" and then write the software that conforms to this vague, entirely subjective concept of "Bach".
The program, once written, wasn't acting on its own. It's clearly acting in accordance with explicit and careful instruction on the part of the programmer(s) who put it together.
Just because we can make a machine that can do X, that machines do X and aren't somehow human - they are as human as their creator.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Computers/processes are quite capable of producing works we percieve as art.
I'll believe it once a poem comes out adequately describing the computational condition.
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
...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)
*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.
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".
> you might as well call the process that took a wolf (a wild predator, beutyfully fit to savagly tear elks into tiny bits) and turned it into a chihuahua (a teeny little thing most suited to be put out of it's misery) for a natural selection.
How many wolves have you ever come across? Okay, how about chihuahuas?
So, who's to say the wolf is fitter?
The way I see it, the gene in ancient proto-dogs that said 'when a human being takes you in and feeds you, and occasionally asks you to have sex with another dog, just go along with it' has been a pretty darned successful gene.
Like it or not, human beings form a very large part of the competitive landscape for animals nowadays.
But what we're talking about here is poems, not animals, so your argument just falls right over and lies on the ground, twitching, anyway. The only fitness criterion to judge a poem by is whether it says something to the soul of a human being. You can't simulate it by quantitative measurement - it's a qualitative judgement based soleley on the human condition. So, selecting poems for survival based on their suitability for acceptance in the human mindscape by asking people to pick the one that speaks to them is the best fitness test they could use.
If it makes you feel better about the mechanism in use, consider the human readers as primitive predators, hunting down and killing the weaker poems, so only the strong survive to breeding age.
Ah: a proof by redefinition. Most of us think of art as "that which is succesful in its purpose of being aesthetically pleasing," while you have defined it as "that which is succesful in its purpose of being aesthetically pleasing AND is made by humans." Fine. You're only begging the question. If you insist on your definition, of course it's not art. Regardless whether you're technically right, you've not said anything of merit.
Ever read Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad"? One of my favorite stories in that collection concerns the creation of an electronic bard. My favorite excerpt:
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi
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