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.

Comments

Re:It's not poetry

[ChopsMIDI]

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.

Interesting, but...

[Nucleon500]

In sentencnces (and even poems), words have complex interdependencies, and sometimes even meanings. So instead of evolving a poem, it would be better to evolve a poem-making machine.

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.