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Artificial Poetry
Generation/1 was the graduation project of Sim Schindel and Omer Kursat
(yours truly), at the Bogazici University in Istanbul, in 1977. As a
graduation requirement of the Associate Degree in Computer Programming
curriculum, students were required to complete a project to develop a
software application. In addition to implementation of the software
(design, coding, debugging and demonstration), an accompanying term
paper had to be presented.
Since the aim of the two-year program was to prepare students for
immediate employment upon graduation, the selection of the subject
matter was somewhat critical and had to be approved by the professors.
The business applications naturally were most popular with the rest of
the class, however Sim and I did not want to work on yet another payroll
application—we were still in school, we were radical, and would deal
with the boring real-life work later when we grew up!
I am not sure how “poetry generation” came about
as the topic, perhaps it was just a "bright idea" from Sim; perhaps a
book of poems that we were reading, possibly of modern poetry. I
was into the style of the beat generation, influenced by writings of
Jack Kerouac and the lyrics of Jim Morrison. During the course of
the project, I also became aware of the work of Clark Coolidge, Michael
McClure and others.
I am not also sure how we came up with the APG/1 name—the name obviously
dates the project (think 2001: A Space Odyssey), the days of
PL/1’s, UNIVAC’s and IBM’s and HAL’s, when spellcheckers and online
dictionaries did not exist. (In today’s world, we probably would have
called it iPoem or Poetico, and it would tweet its output!)
I think the “love and creativity” subtitle was
an effort to identify it as an art (as opposed to business) project, and
probably to deliver a "love and peace" message as part of the hippie
influence—the message was also delivered by the buttons that I made for
the team members (hand-made, shown above).
In retrospect, the complexity of the system
seems rather trivial in light of today’s amazing spectrum of computer
use in arts and literature and the advancements in computer technology.
On the other hand, the results were pleasingly surprising for us, and
were appreciated by fellow students and the professors, judging by the
standards and expectations of those days.
The system had a certain feeling of smartness in
it; deep down inside we knew that it was just random gibberish, but of
the many stanzas that the system spewed out, every so often one would
stand out, delighting us with its wittiness, rhythms and rhymes,
challenging us to understand its meaning.
Now that I think about it, APG/1 was more than
just a
bunch of monkeys typing away, it was our creation—with its
overall engine design that defined its capabilities and limitations;
with the tweaks that we had programmed in, gently influencing its
behavior and style; and with the custom dictionary that we had built,
which only had 3150 words, but had the smarts of meter, rhyme, subject,
and word classifications such as time, quantity, manner and quality.
We also realized that the system could be used
as a source of inspiration, a tool to stir up imagination. We
wrote our own poems by combining APG/1 poetry; as we did not want to
remove APG/1's contribution altogether, we only grouped together single
lines and complete stanzas from different poems and did not make any
alterations within the line (see an example here).
With these in mind, I realize now that the
system had met its expectations, and delivered poetry—artificial or
otherwise.
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