 The Most Famous Bard
|
July 23, 2003 — Is the following verse the most exquisite poetry ever written, or load of old codswallop? It may someday evolve into something as celebrated as anything that Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats or Milton ever wrote, according to a new Web site.
enkindle ships of men loved
for jest from quiet neotype
with give frenchify of phosphoresce
but you, purloiner, not could
The site has forged the concept of "Darwinian poetry," or poetry that is automatically written by computer but, like all life on Earth, has to fight to survive.
|
 
 |
|||||||
Just as in the natural world, the computer's bad poems are killed off, but the "good" ones survive.
With each generation, they are refined and improved through evolutionary pressure.
The creator of "Darwinian poetry," David Rea of Greenwich, Conn., loaded the program with 1,000 randomly generated words, culled from Hamlet, Beowulf and parts of the Iliad.
Like genes that make up a life form, these words are assembled by the computer to create the verse.
A visitor to the Web site is presented with two poems that are put together from the verbal gene pool, and is asked to pick the most appealing version.
Poems with the most positive votes undergo further evolution. They "breed" with each other, swapping words, just as mating animals exchange genes.
Some genomes turn out more popular than others because they form semi-meaningful phrases or have an emotional impact.
These survivors are "mated" with others to form new verses, and the offspring is once again put to the public vote. Over time, the poems "will interbreed and more and more interesting poems will emerge," Rea said.
"It could take a while. Weeks... months... I don't know. If enough generations go by, and if the gene pool is rich enough, we should eventually start to see interesting poems emerge."
One of the doubters is the British weekly New Scientist, which reports on "Darwinian poetry" in Saturday's issue.
It recalled that in the cult sci-fi work "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" there were characters called Vogons, whose poetry was so bad that it could kill.
"Now an experiment to create poems on the web looks likely to automate the awfulness of Vogon verse," it observed grimly.
< news main
