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.
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
"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.
His dangling participle slowly conjugated her verb. There was a pregnant pause...
can anyone tell me the Prose and Cons of Darwinian Poetry? :P
Join the TWIT army now!
Having sex? And this is posted to slashdot? I doubt many readers here will have experience in this area.
Oh, we have plenty of sex. It is the, um, partner thing that we need to work on.
Table-ized A.I.
> 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
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!
Let's format this a little better:
:-)
Only on Slashdot
Read of poems having sex
While still I get none
Not bad. Now lets take another one:
While reading bad stuff
thought about the creative:
Was a waste of time.
Ok, that isn't good, but let's through them in the sack and see what pops out...
While reading slashdot
Read about creative sex
While still I waste none.
My head hurts now.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"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 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
Sex: Check
With a Partner: Check
During the period since I started reading Slashdot: No Check
I guess he has a point.
> 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
We've mastered the singleplayer levels and done the campaign over and over (and over). Now we want to try out this multiplayer thing we keep hearing about.
Disclaimer: That was blatantly ripped from a User Friendly comic. Sadly, their search engine doesn't seem to be working quite as well as the Penny-Arcade one.
Nevermind, we rarely have experience in any area, but we still comment on them. After all, it's the way of the Slashdot.
Money for nothing, pix for free
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