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."

Comments

Link to program

[benna]

Here is a link to the site where you can download this program.

Re:Not convincing

[belmolis]

None of the haikus under the "More Poetry" link have the correct number of syllables.

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 e
shi 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.

Re:I decided to read the patent page.

[servoled]

If you looked at the image of the patent it would be a lot more readable. The .backslash. is just a code that the uspto uses to substitue for "\" to make it easier for their search engine to handle it. It does similar things with divide, multiple, integrals, paragraph characters, square roots, etc...

Patent lawyers on Ark B, and Vogon poetry

[Morgaine]

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.