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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."
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.
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
/usr/games/fortune -o limerick
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.
...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
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.
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.
No. Although I'm kind of depressed. Patented AI... whee! That'd be nightmare prediction number #237 to come true since 1998.
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
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!
Here you go, W.C.Williams....
So much (i.e. my
Pulitzer)
depends upon an ambiguous
statement
with no actual
application
beside a bland
image
--
That's mine. Oh, and here's one from my lit book, by Kenneth Koch, tearing apart the silly Plums one
"Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams"
1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.
2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.
3
I gave away the money that you have been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.
4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!
--
No, the patent is overkill. W.C.W. could be replaced with a very short shell script.
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
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.
"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.
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.
You guys are morons...
A blog like any other.
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 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.
...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
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/
(In Brooklyn accent) I gotcher classics right here: Here I sit, all broken-hearted. Tried to SCO, but only farted.
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.
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!
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
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?
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
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.
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...