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
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
"It was the best of times... It was the BLURST OF TIMES?!?! Stupid monkey!"
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.
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.
can anyone tell me the Prose and Cons of Darwinian Poetry? :P
Join the TWIT army now!
> The front page is still functioning, but the applet is down for the count.
Sadly, the poetry evolved to the point where it attracted a predator's attention, and now it's gone extinct.
This is why I'm against broadcasting our presence to the stars.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
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...
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.
Your's not to make reply,
Your's not to reason why,
Your's but to crash and die:
Into the valley of delete
Rode the six hundred submissions.
Alas, poor server! I knew him, Mutantninja: a CPU
of Intelish host, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne clients on his backbone a thousand times; and now, how
abused on my internet it is!
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 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.
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
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.
...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
There's no way 'evolution' can form a poem, from the looks of it.
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".
Little User who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee logon & bid thee hack.
By the watercooler & o'er the back;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing bought online;
Gave thee such a tender type,
Making all bloggers gripe:
Little User who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
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.
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
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.
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