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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."
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
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.
I don't feel like RTFA, but this seems relevent.
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.
Properly speaking, that is, in Japanese, haiku are not specified in terms of syllables. They're specified in terms of moras (Japanese onsetsu), the things of which a light syllable has one and a heavy syllable has two (or occasionally three). For example, here's a well known classic haiku:
na ra na na eshi chi doo ga ran
ya e za ku ra
I've broken it down into syllables. As you can see, there are five in each line. The reason this is well-formed is that the syllable doo counts as two moras since it has a long vowel and the syllable ran counts as two moras since it has a closing consonant. So the second line contains seven moras even though it only contains five syllables. In sum, a haiku is a poem whose lines contain 5, 7, and 5 moras. How this should translate into English I don't know. Personally, I think English "haiku" sound funny and favor sticking to Japanese.
"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)!"
There is something you might be interested in called Werder. It's been implemented in a perl module in CPAN: Silly::Werder. I still have the original werder.c laying around here somewhere. It's really fun for confusing people on IRC. :)
When cxreg implemented it, he called the language in which it generated output "snoof." Silly::Werder now has options to generate snoof that sounds like several different langauges.
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Silly-Werder/
Some example snoof. It doesn't look like english, but they're pronouncable. For extra fun, pipe werder through festival to hear it spoken!
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.
This has been done before, here and here.
I might argue, as a poet, that your ignorance of modern poetry is laughable. I might pray that your opinion is not representative of the whole. Not only did WCW influence (and participate in) the imagist, objectivist, 'beat' and 'postmodern' poetry movements, he stands among America's greatest poets.
Do you criticise all things that you do not understand? Or maybe it's just those that stand in the face of prevailing convention. Perhaps we should start with Eliot, then. Or maybe Baudelaire. I mean really, un-rhymed poetry? Who'd'a thought?
Perhaps you should find out why Williams happens to be so influential. And why he happens to be in an anthology of poems.
I suggest picking up a book on poetry. Start at address 0x00 and continue. Then a book of poetry. Repeat.
Please reconsider when you have a clue.
On the topic of a "poetic AI" (computerised monkey with typewriter), I wept.
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
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...