Artificial Intelligence
Racter’s opening screen, in glorious black & white.
Commenters are to bloggers not as wigmakers are to bald people, but as flyers are to kiters — another impertinence in the same hostile sky.
I didn’t write that. Well, I did write that, but I copied the form from a beautifully-crafted sentence I encountered recently in The New Yorker. Adam Gopnik wrote the original, in an article about Samuel Johnson:
Critics are to writers not as doctors are to patients but as bearded ladies are to trapeze artists — another, sadder act in the same big show.
Template-based writing ranges from the prosaic — a weather forecast, an obituary, a greeting card — to the outlandish.
My favorite surreal templated writing came from a 1984 artificial intelligence computer program called Racter.
Racter wrote an entire book, “The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed,” according to Racter’s creator, William Chamberlain. More probably, Chamberlain wrote the book, perhaps assisted by some creative algorithms.
Here are some excerpts from that book:
Bill sings to Sarah. Sarah sings to Bill. Perhaps they will do other dangerous things together. They may eat lamb or stroke each other. They may chant of their difficulties and their happiness. They have love but they also have typewriters. That is interesting.
More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity. I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber. I need it for my dreams.
At all events my own essays and dissertations about love and its endless pain and perpetual pleasure will be known and understood by all of you who read this and talk or sing or chant about it to your worried friends or nervous enemies. Love is the question and the subject of this essay. We will commence with a question: does steak love lettuce? This quesion is implacably hard and inevitably difficult to answer. Here is a question: does an electron love a proton, or does it love a neutron? Here is a question: does a man love a woman or, to be specific and to be precise, does Bill love Diane? The interesting and critical response to this question is: no! He is obsessed and infatuated with her. He is loony and crazy about her. That is not the love of steak and lettuce, of electron and proton and neutron. This dissertation will show that the love of a man and a woman is not the love of steak and lettuce. Love is interesting to me and fascinating to you but it is painful to Bill and Diane. That is love!
Racter, is, alas no longer available, otherwise my blog would get much more frequent updates. 
Oh wait, I remember reading part of that book about a million years ago. I think I got started on that whilst in a history discussion with Ak (who was, roughly at that time, working up algorithms for Steve Wolfram at LANL and found the whole AI writing thing fascinating. We giggled at quite a few of those lines).
Template-based writing, at its most usual, is comforting for the reader. Things go as expected and no calypso rhythms jolt the contemplation into making new connections which is, altogether, an effort.
But as they say: it builds character.
I am amazed that artificial intelligence could come up with something that interesting and thought provoking. However, I also don’t understand the real difference between artificial intelligence and programming.
It reminded me of a book I read about love. The book included several short essays about love and none of them claimed to have any truth or even any insight about love. They mostly reviewed the perplexing symptoms and side affects of love.
Decades later I saw that a psychiatrist I know was reading a book called “The Psychiatry of Love.” I asked him if he learned from it anything surprising or even interesting or good to know about love and he said “Not really.” That was probably the answer that he knew I would understand. However, next week I will see him and I will ask him again and press for a better answer based on genuine intelligence. I think this blog entry was more about artificial intelligence than love but I believe this impertinence qualifies this as a genuine comment.
Now for something even more impertinent. The skiing has been great but on April 15 I move back to Santa Clara and I am looking forward to seeing my flying buddies again!
dt
This caught my interest long enough to read it twice. Very interesting…nodding my head…ok I’m Brintey Spears, confused and dazed.
I’ll write back once I figure out what I read and then admit I don’t know how to computate the shallow imagination that dwells near the outerlimits of the inner mechanism of my mind.
My brain hurts now.
My genius psychiatrist friend doesn’t even remember ever knowing of the book “The Psychiatry of Love”. I therefore proclaim that I have nothing to offer this thread.
dt