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Kurzweil Gets A Patent For Poetic Software
theodp writes "Ray Kurzweil, inventor of the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind, has developed what he calls a cybernetic poet, software that allows a computer to create poetry by imitating but not plagiarizing the styles and vocabularies of human poets. A sample: 'Sashay down the page...through the lioness...nestled in my soul.' Impressed? The USPTO, who sponsored the Independent Inventors Conference Mr. Kurzweil spoke at on Nov. 17, seems to be. On Nov. 11, Ray Kurzweil received U.S. Patent No. 6,647,395 for Poet Personalities."
:)
Are we short on poetry these days?
(BTW, that line didn't even make sense...)
clifgriffin > blog
Looks like we're one step closer to Trurl's Electronc Bard (The Cyberiad)
Maybe that's why those darned Vogons are so intent on building that hyperspace bypass here...
Here is a link to the site where you can download this program.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Now my computer's going to get laid more then me.
Poetic justice is pending.
This program only runs on Windows 98, not 2000 or XP?
Why, there are many gothic poem generators, for example.
/ scribble.com/dghq/gothlyric/g e.com/poetry/index.html ...Of course, random "depressing" words isn't saying much, is it? It all depends on how you define poetry, I guess.
http://www.gis.net/~jspower/random.html
http:/
http://www.deadloun
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
and we'll be listening to completely digitally generated music on the FM dial. Just mix in a little Mandelbrot Music with the words of this fine program, and we are good to go.
/usr/bin/grep -i -E meaning life.txt
Bah! None of the haikus under the "More Poetry" link have the correct number of syllables. And this got a patent???
The first refernce: Patent for "Method and apparatus for generating text", 1987.
.backslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..back slash..backslash. since they rhyme with each other and are placed in a first rhyme set, while "go" and "know" are numbered .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash. since they rhyme with each other, and not with "lamb" and "slam," and thus are numbered to indicate membership in a second rhyme set. The resulting poem is; why go .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash.slam.ba ckslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..backsla sh..backslash., know .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash. the lamb .backslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..back slash..backslash..
The following is an actual paragraph from the newly announced patent:
Referring to FIG. 4, table 56 having words and their associated rhyme numbering is shown for the poem "why go slam, know the lamb." The words "lamb" and "slam" are both numbered
I can't go on.... I can't see how the patent system is anything but a joke, one that does good for nobody but the lawyers.
As a human being, I think I am qualified to judge, and that isn't poetry. Even Frost could tell that.
This may be a hasty reply, but I never liked "analyzing" poetry as it is. I can't imagine what would happen if they tried to get students to read this stuff in school.
I wouldn't want to get this as a homework assignment...
lioness? what lioness? is it the soul of the lioness? is the lioness a model? wtf?
...I keep getting the same poem.
A patent has been granted
Giving backing to my lines,
So if you write some similar code
You'll face some hefty fines.
My haiku:
Tonight On Slashdot
Kurzweil Poetry Machine
Please don't mod me down
... Maybe I shouldn't quit my day job.
I planned on inserting something witty here but never got around to it.
And the best part is it only takes 556 gigs of reference material to do something along the lines of "the cat is fat".
I'm unimpressed.
It's AI seems only capable of duplicating style...but it turns out peoms that make no sense. It seems to have no concept of word relationships, outside of simple grammar and organization.
Like I said, gimme Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson...who needs this?
Clif
clifgriffin > blog
When Dipslime or $cientology do a newsgroup flood/sporgery, we can marvel at the poetry rather than cruelly filtering the babble to the bit-bucket.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I don't feel like RTFA, but this seems relevent.
Having read some of the generated "poetry", I think this speaks more to the pointlessness of modern poetry more then it reflects well on Kurzweil. Show me a poem with real meat, like, say, Poe wrote, and I'd be much more impressed.
Put a modern poem in front of me and some of the fully random poetry I've seen and I can't tell the difference; if a random algorithm works that well, anything can work that well. There's just no meaningful information, in the information-theoretic sense, in a modern poem of that length.
I don't know whether to be impressed; somebody feed it Poe and tell me how it does. If it's any good, then I'll be impressed.
Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex
helped program the 'aesthetics engine'
Its all been done before of course. I could cite you papers on markov chains, self organising semantic maps and suchlike going back to the 50s and 60s, thankfully I can't be bothered.
I went to a conference back in the 80s when someone showed us a computer poet. It quite good actually. But I was stoned. Same kind of thing 'in the style of' based on frequency analysis and linear predictive coding.
Patents on this kind of thing? Bollocks more like.
Kurtzweil make some good pianos, not the same chap I guess.
Like I said, gimme Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson...who needs this?
Didn't Kurzweil get arrested for child porn in the x-files movie?
It's just like the Slashdot editors to post stories about paedophiles on the front page. A little bit of Jon Katz lives on in each of the other editors, even if Katz is long gone.
The days of yore
have gone away.
Long forgotten
are their ways.
When there was here good news found.
Not mindless drivel
of inane clowns.
This tale of woe
and of deep dread
makes no sense
and hurts one's head.
I don't see
what's so spiffy.
Just give me more news
all about netBSD.
Copywrong Carl Eric von Kleist, IV
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I can't spell I'm sorry. I'm gonna go jump off a cliff now.
Pretty current, eh?
Jon Trowbridge did this a while ago: Gnoetry
A long time ago, in a gala^h^h^h^h forum on CIS (Compuserve, for you script-kiddies), I downloaded an app named Babble that analyzed text and attempted poetry. Actually, I think analyze is too strong a work for what Babble did. You fed Babble text files of whatever you wanted sampled and babble spit out mixed-up jumbles of phrases. Ninety percent of the time it was utter garbage, not even beat poets would like it. Occasionally it ejected something plausible and possibly poetic. Ah, patience rewarded.
There is prior artwork here. This patent may have trouble remaining. I have never been able to find this app, but anyone else should be able to scan some DOS libraries and might find it. Go, find the app and stop the patent madness.
Pure drivvel. What a yawn.
The Red WheelbarrowThis Is Just to SayPerhaps an improved version of the program could make things like this.
I'm getting tired of this cyber computer logarithmic algorithm poetry bullshit. Poetry isn't poetry without a human experience at the genesis of it so that the human reading it knows it's born out of his own kind and can relate.
How the fuck am I supposed to relate to silicone?
I, for one,
welcome our
new cybernetic
poet overlords.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I saw this ages ago, and this whole generator is just something to support his book, in which he talks about robo-poets. All the poetry has less meaning than anything a fourth-grader could make, and isn't that what poetry is about? Just because someone reads Eliot or Pinsky and sees fancy words and meaningless allutions, doesn't mean it is true.
1984 anyone?
"It was only an 'opeless fancy,
It passed like an Ipril dye,
But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred
They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!"
Please help stop software patentability in the EU. (coz I want to write this program! okay, not really)
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
No. :)
For example, I have a program called autopoem (written by Bill Sethares) loosely based on an idea from Shannon's original paper on information theory.
Suppose you took all the words in the English language and calculated how often the character "s" is followed by the character "t", the character "e", and so on. You'd end with a table of transition probabilities that showed how often each letter is followed by any other letter (or punctuation mark or space) and starting with a single seed letter you could generate "english-like" words randomly. The output using the probability that a single letter is followed by another letter doesn't actually resemble English much, nor does the output using probabilities based on two letter combinations (how often is "th" followed by "e", by "a", and so on) but by the time you get to 3 letter combinations, (how often is "the" followed by "a" or by "s") the output starts to look a lot like "twas brillig and the slithy toves", like ye olde englishe with very creative spelling.
The scheme I described above is difficult to implement in practice, because the table of probabilities gets big fast as the number of letters used to determine the next letter gets longer. Autopoem uses a particular text as a source and instead of generating a table of probabilities it scans the text looking for the next of the letter sequence, say "the", and then selects whatever letter or punctuation mark comes next, say "a", then it continues scanning until it finds the next occurrence of "hea", and selects the following letter, and so on. the longer the sequence of letters, the more likely it is that whole words or phrases from the original text will appear in the output. An alternative version, requiring a reasonably long text, applies the same principle on the word level, how often is the word "red" followed by the word "hat" or "dog" or so on.
Here's some autopoem output:
Your strip of entirely
tired witches scarecrow me at night
That reached the next
He witches at and glow in a cruel head
Done behind the mark
Nothing but the Land of blue
And the green wizard answer with sharp teeth
(anyone care to guess the source text?)
Other ideas/algorithms/programs that fall into the same genre are dilbert's corporate values generator (now defunct?), eliza (especially when she interacts with zippy), madlibs (I don't know of a computer application), scott reynen's poetry and prose generators, rob malda's poetry generator (currently offline) & googlism.
Any suggestions or links to related programs would be greatly appreciated.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
Their website has this as a haiku written after reading various authors:
You broke my soul
the juice of eternity,
the spirit of my lips.
But it doesn't work out. The first line is four syllables, while the last line is 6. Haiku are 5-7-5. Silly computers, they must have taken the adding chip out of that one.
to avoid spontanious shut downs and blue screens, do not use any of Sylvia Plath's poems as the reference source.
Somewhat along these lines... I heard a story on some NPR program in the past week (I think it was from the CBC) about a guy applying genetic algorithms to creating poetry. Users score poems and the highest scoring are used to make new ones. Here's the link.
I thought it was neat anyway.
"The Cyberiad", by Stanislaw Lem (1965). This is what the machine composes when someone asks it to write a poem expressed in the language of pure mathematics:
"Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indicies 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)!"
Finally, poetry with no deep, hidden meaning!
I wrote a poem for English class once. It was one of those deals where I didn't have anything to write about. So I started reading Slashdot. This was at the time where there were three Palladium/TCPA/WTF-it's-now stories a day, as opposed to three SCO stories a day. To make a long story short, I wrote one of those poems that wasn't about Palladium, but really it was. Damn, I thought I had just written an absolute POS.
I was very surprised when my English teacher really liked it. She liked it so much that she entered it in a state-wide contest for high school students.
Yeah. Well, my poem won. So I get to read it at the sponsoring organization's next meeting. I go there and, of course, I see that my poem had been selected as the best by none other than old ladies and somewhat-less-than-straight men. One of the old ladies told me that my entry was one of the more "interesting" ones she'd seen.
So, uh, yeah... that's my story...
Criticizing it on the basis of whether the words have the meanings we commonly associate them with is a low blow. The question is, if the words did mean that, would the style REALLY be that of the analyzed author, or not very much so? Could you make a poem half-way between two?
Of course, Metamagical Themas is required reading here... as are most of the works in the bibliography. There's a lot more to this than just generating pesudo-poetry.
It's a strange thing, though... in the 80's, you didn't patent this stuff. (leave aside whether one could) It was just a toy. Nowadays if you make a program that generates fake poetry, you can patent it as generating real poetry, and if someone else makes a program that generates real poetry with a better analysis model, BANG, you have rights to their work. You've patented doing it with "an analysis model". Weird.
I seem to recall quite a few DOS apps that used to do this back in the day. Not to mention at least 1 BBS door. Who are they kidding?? This isn't a new idea, nor is it a very inovative. My tagline can beat your tagline up....
1. Code for Vogon poetic traits.
2. Write code that iterates over the Vogon poetic output, increasing the Vogonity of the poems with each iteration.
3. Link with Outlook worm.
4. Mail to patent holder(s).
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Martin Gardner wrote about these in the 70s.
I saw one in DOS once - it uses Markov chains to generate prose - no big deal.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
We should just take already existing poems, have them translated into Japanese, and then have the Japanese translate it back into English. Put it all together and voila!:
All your base are belong to us.
http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/emmy.html
some of them are pretty convincing
I worked for a guy who wrote a haiku generating signature generator back in 1998. And his was based on the idea of some perl module that did something simular but with rhyming poetry.
Straight up, dawg.
Little Bo Peep fucked her sheep
Blew a horse, licked his feet
She ate his ass so very nice
Tongued his balls not once but twice
I always though Coy was a fun module to get poems from. I don't think it works with Perl 5.8 though.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I don't mean to say that I am impressed by Kurzweil's program. I believe I could conquer the same problem given the time and impetus -- I'm sure lots of people here could. But, a few thoughts:
a) The meaning of the "lioness" poem couldn't be clearer. The writer's emotional drive is the lioness, and it is expressed in poetry, hence "sashay down the page." Given, the writer in this case has no emotions, but really, do we honestly know that say, Dickens actually *felt* what she wrote? Maybe she pulled a fast one on us. Does it matter? This is the crisis, you know, that the postmoderns have been grappling with for about 40 years now.
b)Postmodernism, in turn, is about as current as Handel oratorios.
c)My conclusion: folks here at Slashdot central might need to pry themselves away from their O'Reilly books for a few minutes and take a gander at the 21st century. It's amazing to me how a group of people that were supposedly riding the crest of the wave just a few years ago sound like a bunch of 50's reactionaries when the subject turns to the arts. "Bah! Modern poetry! What a bunch of crap. Give me Frost!"
Cheers!
Eschewing the patent issue for a moment and focusing on the question of whether poetry consitutes artificial intelligence, the question is: whose intelligence?
I read Kurzweil's book, The Age of Spiritual Machines and he had various samples of computer poetry there. I remember thinking that one of them was stunningly good, at least to my taste.
But I also found myself wondering... how many (hundreds of? thousands of?) poems were discarded by humans in an attempt to find a couple good ones, and is this vaunted computer poetry really mostly a product of human selection from reams of pseudo-sensical word combinations? I never saw any disclosure or discussion of these sorts of factors in Kurzweil's writings. Keep your eye out for this.
--LP
I like computers because they're precise: they do exactly what you tell them, and they tell you exactly what they've done. I already have enough things in my life that don't make sense, computers should not be one of them.
And another:
Littly Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey
Along came a spider,
Sat down beside her, And said, "Hey, what's in the bowl, bitch?"
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
There's more,
Mary had a little lamb
She kept in her backyard
When she took her panties off
His wooley dick got hard
Another politicalty correct gem:
Rub a Dub Dub
Three men in a tub
Faggots have threesomes, too
So fuckin' what
Hickory dickory dock
Some chick was sucking my cock
The clock struck two, I dropped my goo
I dumped the bitch on the next block.
I love poetry, Dice.
http://megahal.sourceforge.net. Check out http://megahal.sourceforge.net/Classic.html for examples. It happens to use markov models (more specifically, 5th order n-grams).
Speaking of Marys,
Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
Trim that pussy it's so damn hairy
I can't believe noone yet mentioned Stanislav
Lem. One his more humorous stories dealt with
a similar machine though one that could
produce real poetry, meaningful, beautifully
written and confroming to arbitrary constraints,
like one where all words had to begin with same
letter. If you read the story you know this
invention will lead to no good.
Well if you cum over, I can swallow
If you can cum over, I can swallow
Yeah, Babble was great. It was able to associate words, so it was actually understandable some of the time. I used to make Dr. Sbaitso read that stuff.
...that in granting Kurzweil a patent on software that composes poetry, the government has issued him a poetic license?
Or perhaps it's simply poetic justice that such a seemingly silly patent should be issued.
No matter how bad things were already, with the advent of digital poetry, I can't help but think that things have gotten a bit verse.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Someone wrote some software to write poetry back in the 60s or early 70s.
The only line I remember from it was "All God's chillun, got algorithm." I always thought that was a bit interesting for a computer.
Though not quite as elaborate, this reminds me of an applet a former professor of mine wrote for some amusement one day:
http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/poetry2/
There's no point to this. If he invented a piece of software that decided on it's own that it wanted to write poetry then THAT would be something worth patenting.
This immediately reminded me of one case which sticks in my mind - a case about a cat, "The Cat in a Hat". A parody was written in the style of Dr. Seuss which made fun of the O.J. Simpson trial. The parody was entitled "The Cat NOT in the Hat! A Parody by Dr. Juice".
The case involved copyright claims among others. The defendants argued their work was a parody and thus qualified as fair use. The court affirmed an injunction against the distribution of the parody. In so finding, the court cited several definitions of parody, noting that an important component of parody is mimicry of style (to conjure up the original) for purposes such as comment or ridicule.
[To qualify for fair use, a four part balancing test is used.
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work]
The court compared rather extensive amounts of both The Cat in the Hat and The Cat NOT in the Hat! A Parody by Dr. Juice. The court found that all four factors weighed against a finding of fair use (though in my view, it did some handwaving when discussing the 3rd factor). Two quotes seem relevant here:
"Although The Cat NOT in the Hat! does broadly mimic Dr. Seuss' characteristic style, it does not hold his style up to ridicule. The stanzas have "no critical bearing on the substance or style of" The Cat in the Hat." (i.e. the style was copied but not for parody)
and
"The Cat in the Hat is not conjured up by the focus on the Brown-Goldman murders or the O.J. Simpson trial. Because there is no effort to create a transformative work with "new expression, meaning, or message," the infringing work's commercial use further cuts against the fair use defense." (i.e. the content was not parodied)
With Kurzweil's invention, it seems the outcome would be similar. Kurzweil might even be in a worse situation than the writers of "The Cat NOT in the Hat! A Parody by Dr. Juice" as
(1) it would be hard to claim that the output of Kurzweil's program was a parody of a prior poet's work - at least the writers argued that the "The Cat NOT in the Hat! A Parody by Dr. Juice" was a parody as it contrasted the horror of O.J.'s actions against the puerile acts of the Cat in Dr. Seuss' work.
(2) factor 4 for Kurzweil would likely be weaker - the poems produced by the program are, in being the same style, arguably targeted to the same audience as the one which finds the original poet enjoyable, thus constituting competition (potentially).
I fed the Cybernetic Poet the sonnets of Shakespeard, but constrained it to use only words still in use. The output mostly dealt with the sexual predilections of one "man from Nantucket", and a an oft-recurring phrase that "he said with a grin, as he wiped off his chin".
The text of the case is here.
Seriously, people, who cares? This isn't even a useful invention, so who gives a rat's ass if they grant a patent for it? Would we be discussing it if the makers of "Billy Bigmouth Bass" had gotten a patent for their talking fish doll? The only difference is that there's even less appeal to computer-generated poetry than there is for talking electronic fish.
Simulation is just not enough. simulated fire dont burn my flesh. simulated poetry dont burn my mind.
Let Kurzweil simulate Hoelderlin. or ee cunnings. how far he can go with them?
(anyone has read: poietic software?)
When I read poetry, I like to have the illusion that what I am reading was carefully thought about and created; trying to find meaning in a computer generated poem is as pointless as trying to find meaning in a book from Borges' Library of Babel.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I knew a fellow in '97 who was wrote a recombinant text generator for AK Dewdney (a prof at my old Uni UWO)
: www.qut.edu.au/edu/cpol/foucault/links2.html+%22re combinant+text+generator%22+%22Freud,+Marshall+McL uhan,+and+Michel+Foucault%22&hl=en&ie=UTF- 8
There is a blurb on it here:
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:AcQ0gQ02qrsJ
It actually worked and the stuff it spit out was somewhat poetic nonsense... wonder if it qualifies as prior art?
-Ironstorm:users.sf.net
A lot of interesting people have learning problems with issues like style. If you put each of them at a typewriter, however... Kurzweil's poetry engine seems to be little more than a wham-o-dyne Dissociated Press script. The inclusion of pronounciation parsing is cute, but hardly a leap in AI sciences. From another point of view, this has got to be the best documented piece of software I've ever seen. Maybe the GNU Project should start patenting everything they write. Would be interesting to see the GPL "hereby incorporated by reference".
Batou: Hey, Major... You ever hear of "human rights"? Major: I understand the concept, but I've never seen it in action
Just tonight, Kurzweil's cyberpoet made his way into my /home and demanded WINE from me. I relented. He died nearly instantaneously, apparently from a poorly made batch.
I entrust you with his posthumous manuscript:
file_set_error: Permission denied
fixme:ntdll:RtlNtStatusToDosError no mapping for 0001869f
wine: Unhandled exception, starting debugger...
err:seh:start_debugger Couldn't start debugger ("winedbg --debugmsg -all --auto 134725312 0x44") (2)
Read the Wine Developers Guide on how to set up winedbg or another debugger
Oh cruel fate! Another genius cut down!
Although the sample looks impressive, I have a feeling that it is non-representative of the actual poetry put out by the program. If the program writes enough lines and there is a human on the other end deciding which poems to submit as samples, the quality of the example poem is a statement only to the artistic judgment of the human and not to the quality of the program writing the poem. Although this doesn't account for the entirety of the poem's quality (it would take a long time for a program just stringing words together to be coherent at all), there probably is a great deal of magnification going on here due to selection.
wrote Poetics more than 2000 years ago! For those who haven't read it - Poetics is a university text book that describes how to write poems and religious texts.
This has been done before, here and here.
Human communication is, in fact, very ambiguous by nature. A tone of your voice may change the message. Words have many meanings and can be understood completely differently depending on, for instance, the mood of the listener.
I personally love ambiguity and freeform expression. I feel more comfortable with loose or no structure than with the strict metric and rhyming as in the poem by Frost you quote. Rhyming, particularly, is a real turn-off. A rhyming poem just doesn't breath.
I'm also very sensitive to a poem that tries to get a message across. I am not interested in what feelings/thoughts the author himself is trying to get across. To me all good art is like a reflecting surface that shows YOU, the audince, in a different, surprising light. Sometimes you like what you see, sometimes you don't like what you see.
You also imply that writing modern poetry does not require effort or talent. The same has been said about modern art and music. I would say that it is much harder to write/compose in a new form than just conforming to an existing form.
The owls are not what they seem
Computerized poets have been done before, many times. Even by myself.
...but isn't there plenty of prior art to be found at the local coffee shop?
Somebody's got to get his computer one of these:
:)
code poet T-shirt
I've already got mine
Maybe that's why those darned Vogons are so intent on building that hyperspace bypass here...
You're spot on, but for the wrong reason. The Vogons never really considered the Kurzweil poet AI as worthy competition for their poetry, but this possibility did give the mice an excellent excuse for having the Earth destroyed while hiding the real reason why this had to be done.
Because you see, earlier in the experiment that led to the creation of planet Earth, a catastrophic error was made: they forgot to weed out latent patent clerks from among the management consultants and telephone sanitizers that were sent off on Ark B, as a result of which by the end of the 2nd millennium the planet was completely overrun with demented patent clerks that brought all technical progress to a standstill.
While some computer scientists (well, OK, just Bill Joy) declared this to be conclusive proof for the Halting Problem, all sentient life everywhere recognized the extreme danger of Earth's patent clerk infecting the rest of the universe with insanity, so planetary termination became non-optional.
The Vogons were of course happy to carry out the task, but their fondness for hyperspace bypasses really had nothing to do with it. To understand the Vogon eagerness to destroy Earth, you just need to consider the fact that patent clerks cannot distinguish original poetry from age-old nursery rhymes, and being non-sentient, nor can they feel the sadistic pain of Vogon poetry recitals. Put those two things together and it was only a question of which Vogon captain would reach Earth first. Even without the benefit of a Vogon background, it's easy to see their point.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Rat: The key to being a great poet is to be so obscure that nobody can understand you, much less criticize you.
"Atop the fog
the zebra's buttocks
angry at my
mother's sloth"
Don't tell anyone my secret.
Goat: I don't think I'll have to.
Pearls Before Swine
My sig will be released in 2015 third quarter. Rating pending.
everybody please check out: alpha60.de poetry machine 1.0 is a project by german media artist/ theorist david link and definitely the first machine really generating text on a completely autonomous basis through specialized bot search on the net. kurzweil's just quite a silly toy, leaving out meaning.
The cybernetic poet reminds me of a short story of Stanislaw Lem: "The electrobard of Trurl". Quite similar concepts indded!
I think that I remember a prof of mine talking about a class assignment he had either given or done in where the object was to write a program that could imitate author's styles...
I think that he said that there was good success.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
"Atop the fog
the zebra's buttocks
angry at my
mother's sloth"
That's obvious, my mother's sloth is me, and the zebra shows her cute stripped ass and is pissed off at me because being the sloth I am, I haven't fucked her yet this early in the morning!
This thing just put millions of angst-ridden/depressed teenagers out of work.
I know more than you drink.
Ah! Homer Simpson.
Simpleton, moron, stupid
But entertaining.
http://www.ioccc.org/1990/westley.c
;{
;lie;{
char*lie;
double time, me= !0XFACE,
not; int rested, get, out;
main(ly, die) char ly, **die
signed char lotte,
dear; (char)lotte--;
for(get= !me;; not){
1 - out & out
char lotte, my= dear,
**let= !!me *!not+ ++die;
(char*)(lie=
"The gloves are OFF this time, I detest you, snot\n\0sed GEEK!");
do {not= *lie++ & 0xF00L* !me;
#define love (char*)lie -
love 1s *!(not= atoi(let
[get -me?
(char)lotte-
(char)lotte: my- *love -
'I' - *love - 'U' -
'I' - (long) - 4 - 'U' ])- !!
(time =out= 'a'));} while( my - dear
&& 'I'-1l -get- 'a'); break;}}
(char)*lie++;
(char)*lie++, (char)*lie++; hell:0, (char)*lie;
get *out* (short)ly -0-'R'- get- 'a'^rested;
do {auto*eroticism,
that; puts(*( out
- 'c'
-('P'-'S') +die+ -2 ));}while(!"you're at it");
for (*((char*)&lotte)^=
(char)lotte; (love ly) [(char)++lotte+
!!0xBABE];){ if ('I' -lie[ 2 +(char)lotte]){ 'I'-1l ***die; }
else{ if ('I' * get *out* ('I'-1l **die[ 2 ])) *((char*)&lotte) -=
'4' - ('I'-1l); not; for(get=!
get; !out; (char)*lie & 0xD0- !not) return!!
(char)lotte;}
(char)lotte;
do{ not* putchar(lie [out
*!not* !!me +(char)lotte]);
not; for(;!'a';);}while(
love (char*)lie);{
register this; switch( (char)lie
[(char)lotte] -1s *!out) {
char*les, get= 0xFF, my; case' ':
*((char*)&lotte) += 15; !not +(char)*lie*'s';
this +1s+ not; default: 0xF +(char*)lie;}}}
get - !out;
if (not--)
goto hell;
exit( (char)lotte);}
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
The music industry has been using things like this for years. However theirs just copys older songs :P
What will happen is afew 'poets' will say something like "oh its a computer it has no soul" or something equally irritating and then they wont be able to tell the computer from the human in a test
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
A few years ago I wrote a Poem Generator.Possibly it applies as prior art. You can find it here. Source and all.
"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator."
--George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Composing "poetry" is no challenge, because so much poetry is obscure, bad, avant-garde, etc. that it takes centuries to judge whether the stuff is any good--and there's not much of a commercial market, so that can't serve as a test. So nobody can tell whether the latest Markov-generated nonsense (Racter, anyone?) is poetry or not.
Song lyrics, that's the test. When a computer program can produce commercial-quality song lyrics. When a program has produced, say, a body of a dozen song lyrics which are good enough to be recorded by an artist and accepted by audiences that do not know they were produced by a computer, that will be a certifiable achievement.
I'm not talking Cole Porter here, either. But a set of lyrics that has some kind of erotic or emotional resonance to it, even if it sounds stale or derivative. (It doesn't have to be any better than, say, Andrew Lloyd-Webber).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
My first professional job involving computers began in 1979. There was a really stupid security rule that said if the user didn't type something in, or the computer didn't print something out, within a 4 minute timespan, the user would get logged off. The idea was, if you weren't actually tap-tap-tapping or reading and paging down, then you weren't actually using the computer.
Well, about a month after the rule went into effect I encountered a user running a program called "Poetry". Poetry had a table of sentence structures like this: N V N, N V A N, and so on. (Noun Verb Noun, Noun Verb Adjective Noun, etc)
It also had a list of words like this: N Monkey V jump A green N girl A dead, etc.
It would randomly choose a sentence, randomly choose words of the correct type, and match them up roughly according to the number of syllables.
The poetry it produced scanned quite well, actually. And you could customize to any "personality" you wanted by altering the sentence structure and words that it used.
And it output one line of poetry every 3 minutes and 55 seconds, thus defeating the stupid security setup on the computer. Within weeks, everyone was using it. Audits of processes executing showed it was using more CPU time than any other program except for realtime. Then people began hiding the binary unde different names, etc, to confuse the audits. And thus, productivity resumed.
I went looking for the source code for it about ten years ago, but it's long gone. But people still run the program - the executable is now in the system's bin directory. No one cares about the audits anymore. Yeah, the 4-minute rule is still there, too.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I remember the exact words because it was so startling. This text became my "sample text" I used when learning new editors, word processors, etc.
I sent a message to the user saying "Dead Girls Abruptly Quiver?"
He said "Must've had a bad option".
My reply: "You must've had some bad stash."
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
In the 80's a man by the name of William Chamberlain wrote a program called Racter , which had the ability to write poetry. Racter even has a book out called The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed.
Racter had two serious objections. For one, Racter's poetry sounds much like the ramblings of a madman, e.g.:
The other serious objection people have to Racter is that because the author had such a strong influence on the parameters used to generate the poetry that he is the true author and not the computer.
If these same objections can be applied to Kurzweil's work, then the cybernetic poet is no better than Racter and isn't particularly interesting. According to the article, the author claims that his program is more sophisticated than other software out there, but the article doesn't include any specific comparisons.
Is this really a major leap forward or is this just another stab at artificial insanity?
Has anyone read "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed"?
It's an anthology of computer generated poetry from (I believe) the 1980's, but it could be even earlier. Some of it should be considered "art?" rather than art, but the technique it there. Also there was the travestry program which created text in the style of any particular author. You could even select just how similar you wanted the style to be. Travestry was gibberish, but the style came through clearly. Travestry appeared in Byte, though I forget which issue.
I'm sure there are many other works that I just didn't happen to encounter. I know I've encountered computet composed music. Unfortunately, I no longer have a phonograph that will play the floppy record that came in one book. (It was a kind of record that was cheap to press, but which didn't last through many playings...so it might not be any good anymore anyway.) But that's probably less relevant.
Now in most of these cases the people arranging for publication claimed authorship, but they were clearly acting as editors rather than as authors. In fact they didn't disguise the fact, as the authorship that they were proud of was the programs that created the other works.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Not sure if you are trolling or not, but I'll bite...
He doesn't think his poem is great. The reason he won is that some old ladies and gay dudes thought it was 'interesting', even though they likely didn't understand what it was about.
I think there's prior art if it attempts to put style in the equation somehow. Whether or not it should be patentable is an entirely different matter... I was wondering first if this was anything I had done personally, but my text-generation stuff has always been rather crude, the most sophisticated thing I've done is based on context-free grammars, and context-free grammars aren't good for preserving structure but not for making stuff that rhymes (unless we narrow the generation accordingly).
And on the topic, the coolest poetry experiment ever has to be the Coy module for Perl =)
This makes me think about development possibilities for Ray Kurzweil's virtual alter-ego, Ramona. /.ers are divided on the issue of whether the poetry produced by the software is any good, but just think what will happen as similar things are developed and refined.
It seems that
Take a look at Ramona's bio and songs (MP3 format). They are, in the fictional context, her own compositions.
Now, Ray has an avatar that can hold fairly simple conversations with online visitors (and can even, with an IE plug-in, become animated and speak), and a piece of software that can write poetry. Music can be expressed in mathematical terms. How much does anyone want to bet that Kurzweil Labs may be able to develop a "creative AI", one that's able to write its own music and lyrics, and possibly evolve them much as a real musician does?
IMHO, it's just a matter of time until movies like "S1m0ne" become closer to reality. Do you guys/girls/geeks think that the possibility of true artificial intelligence is getting closer?
"It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue." -- Zork
...if this patent stops other people writing software to create more literary rubbish, then I'm all for it.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
I had posted a story on Kurzweil that apparently wasn't as interesting as this one, but I think it still is worth mentioning. It's about an article he wrote in which he predicts that our biological lives will be lived mostly within a Matrix-like virtuality by 2050. An intriguing article, but I ultimately disagreed, citing that the global economy is too labor-intensive to allow the transition.
Is a patent for pathetic software...
Exactly --- algorithmic techniques can be great for providing input and inspiration, but the creative process is as much about discarding bad ideas as it is about coming up with good ones. Producing anything decent, never mind great, requires "killing your babies," being willing to get rid of things that may be funny/clever/evocative on their own, but don't contribute to the whole.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
read the Lem poem
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
No.
Well, PERL was made for this. So, PERL is prior art.
I knew that name sounded familiar.
Ray is also the man behind Kurzweil Music Products who make a lot of high end and mid range gear, including very nice keyboards.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Any chance a "real/true" poet reviews (and interprets) Tesla's, Edison's,... even Kurzweil's inventions in light of their technological environment, behavior, and previous inventions,... and patents the "personality" of their patents in a "poem" the USPTO finds irresistable. I don't think they have a "right" to claim any future inventions,... just the patents to them.
-=-=-
A stripped down version of this simpleton's view of an "art" might include these as atoms of an "artistic experience"
{ Artist-Inventor-Displayer / Art / Receiver }
Viewing the inventor as artist the domain may momentarily seem somewhat enlarged, but that may be an accident of our particular tech point of view,... which might suggest something about poetry and other creative forms.
Thanks for reading.
-=-=-
After recursion comes boredom,... occasionally,... if your attention fails.
Something like this has been available for years on the web at http://www.mockmywords.com/
The program is called "Poet's Assistant." Though it can certainly write "original" poetry, its real purpose is to help poets with their own work. I've tried it, and I found that it can indeed come up with some interesting ideas about my own work. Many here seem too concerned with only the ability to create original work and its similarity to other programs, but they should perhaps read the software description more closely.
That story reminds me of Orwell's 1984, where top-10 songs are written by machines. They're all cheesy man-meets-woman-falls-in-love-leave-cry clicheful songs.
Winston Smith, the main character, knows the songs are made automatically by machines but the peons don't care and listen to the radio.
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
Then, I'm going to send a award to Linus Torvalds, for make the song "kernel", this is a _REALLY_ poetic software
Eduardo N. Fortes
Well of course this post is LAME; do you honestly expect text to get up and move? It's not like they let us put scripts in our posts...
This sounds a lot like something that has been around for years. Check out the "The Postmodernism Generator" - quoting http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/community/postmodern .html , a Monash Uni site: "written by Andrew C. Bulhak, using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars. More detailed technical information may be found in Monash University Department of Computer Science Technical Report 96/264: "On the Simulation of Postmodernism and Mental Debility Using Recursive Transition Networks"." Now available at http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
Gives a whole new ring to: "Actually, I'm a poet. I just write software to pay the bills." Goodbye another pickup line.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
You just fed sample text pieces to the program to analyze and let it generate text. You had several "channels" and could adjust the mixture of these channels. You also had various "effects" that could be added, such as Dyslexia, Lisp, Canadian, Pig Latin, etc... And those could also be mixed.
As far as I can tell, the poetry program uses the same essential techniques of text analyzing and re-mixing, just more dedicated to a specific output.
Oh, you can download Babble from here if you want to play with it.
In the darkness of future past, The magician longs to see. One chants between two worlds, "Fire, walk with me!"
especially because i am having one k2000 v3 for a repair, and i am f*cking with it a month already. construction=idiotic, electronic=diletantic, sounds=nothing_special, features=many:) (for example you can use it as a keyboard stand stabilyzer, as their devices are waay heavy..)
no wonder - kurzweil have no footprints (legendary sounds) in history. and no wonder all the KRZs going around feature stolen sounds from Rolands and Korgs, or homebrew lo-fi's.
now they are trying to leve marks in history by patentic (process we love so much).
*sick*