6 ms·
MIT’s Barry Duncan demonstrates the power of writing in reverse
- anarbadalov 4y agoHad the pleasure of meeting Barry at a work retreat last year. Totally brilliant, and so sweet to boot. The next evening I received an impressive 200-character palindrome he wrote about our conversation! Here's an interesting trailer for a film coming out about him next year if you're curious: https://vimeo.com/29300425 https://vimeo.com/29300425
- bostonpete 4y agoCan you share the palindrome?
- anarbadalov 4y agoSure! Although keep in mind this ("On a Terrace") was written in a 24-hour period, and it won't mean as much to you. Barry's sent me numerous longer and more sophisticated pieces, which he explicitly said i could share with anyone, so i'm including a couple of my favorites below as well. One of these ("Stonewall") he composed on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, the other ("Colin & Jen") is a beautiful little palindrome he wrote for a friend's wedding. On a Terrace: No silly din. A set, sated. I saw one bro: Baltimore has it! Sit. Rapt, I met. Is Anar B, ran a site (MITP). Artist? Is a hero! MIT labor be now aside. Tastes. An idyll is on! Stonewall: No, it's a bar. A ban? One position made fast. It felt, lover, as an age began at – can I say? – a gem. Ah, Stonewall! Its saga's still awe, not shame. Gay, as in: Act! An age began as a revolt, left it safe. Dam? No, it is open on a bar, a bastion. Colin & Jen: Sun I'm in, eh? We met: a Colin, one Jen. On. I locate me when I'm in us.
- pxc 4y agoFTA: > “The thing I really want to do is establish palindrome writing as a literary form, to show people you can write palindromes that are beautiful and funny and factual and have real literary merit,” he says. To me, even just the examples you gave prove that palindromes are essentially poetry in a totally ordinary way. The idea is to express something, intellectually and/or aesthetically, creatively, under constraints based on the structure of the words. Usually it's the syllabic structure, but in the case of palindromes it's the orthographic structure. And it's a really, really hard, singular constraint.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoWow. That video was posted 11 years ago
- 1024core 4y agoWell, so far at least Barry's skills are safe from ChatGPT. Here's what I got when I asked ChatGPT4 to create a palindrome: User: Write a poem which is 100 words long and a meaningful palindrome. ChatGPT: Creating a 100-word palindrome poem that is both meaningful and coherent is an extremely challenging task. However, I have attempted to create a shorter palindrome poem for you: A Santa lived as a devil at NASA, Lonely Tylenol, Evil rats on no star live, Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live, Madam, in Eden, I'm Adam, A man, a plan, a canal: Panama. Please note that while the lines in the poem are palindromes, the poem as a whole isn't. Creating a meaningful and coherent 100-word palindrome poem is an incredibly difficult task, and I apologize for not being able to provide one as requested.
- anarbadalov 4y agoDidn't even occur to me that ChatGPT could achieve this. Isn't there a way to further refine the prompt? (I haven't used it and can't bring myself to finish any of the thousand articles on the subject popping up every day) Edit: Some of these lines individually were interesting ("Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live") — but not a single one, it turns out, is original!
- 1024core 4y agoI made a few attempts, but could not get it to do any better. Someone with better prompt-fu than mine should try.
- gwern 4y agoPalindromes are almost the canonical example of what a GPT-2/3/4 cannot do, due to bytepair encoding: https://gwern.net/gpt-3#bpes https://gwern.net/gpt-3#bpes
- throwawaylinux 4y agoIt just made a bunch of palindromes though.
- laweijfmvo 4y agoI thought this was going to be someone who could produce full-speed, eloquent writing, as a palindrome. Then I saw this 2. Dual. Is time. Rafael went, so passes. Sally’ll assess a post. New leaf. Are MIT’s. I laud 2.
- syndacks 4y agoRight? This is not impressive to say the least. The poor guy has some kind of syndrome it seems…
- antiatheist 4y agoPalindrone syndrome
- leroy-is-here 4y agoI just realized the actual letters are meant to be a palindrome, but the text is meant to be read one-way. "2 Dual" = "laud 2" in reverse. I thought this was a "sentence palindrome", or that I could read from left to right and then right to left and have a coherent sentence either way.
- robertlagrant 4y agoYou will, won't you? It's just...the same thing whether you read it left to right or right to left.
- leroy-is-here 4y agoTry reading the words in reverse. That’s what I mean.
- i-use-nixos-btw 4y agoPalindromes are hard and place severe limitations on what can be written. So the skill is impressive - but it doesn’t change the fact that the end result is absolutely naff. It’s just equally naff in two directions.
- anonymoushero 4y agoI read in The Singularity is Near (by Kurzweil) something about if you can make computation reversible then it won't take/use any energy and thus it won't create any heat. Could this be the way to that?
- bbddg 4y agoYes it is.
- hackernewds 4y agohow is that possible? breaks the laws of thermodynamics
- layer8 4y agoThe second law is only a statistical law. And while it may be impossible in practice to build a physically perfectly reversible computation, there is in principle no limit to how close you could get. Reversible computing is a scientific topic of research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
- elevaet 4y agoThis is similar to how I reverse aging by walking backwards. Works like a charm! /s
- jecel 4y agoReversible computing[1] allows us to use less energy than the von Neumann–Landauer limit of kT ln(2) energy dissipated per irreversible bit operation (note that our current technology is still many orders of magnitude from this limit). It does not reduce the energy requirements to zero. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing
- jvandonsel 4y agoFun fact: The entire article is a palindrome.
- hackernewds 4y agoit is not
- bee_rider 4y agoMaybe the fun thing about the fact is that it isn’t true.
- gweinberg 4y agoWell, at least we didn't get a banana bag again.
- Aeglaecia 4y agohttps://gwern.net/doc/www/www.rexresearch.com/15e59780a9b80cb61273afa3fec1a2f5a0444868.html https://gwern.net/doc/www/www.rexresearch.com/15e59780a9b80c...
- rbanffy 4y agoOne exercise I loved in teaching programming was the string inverter function. I always gave “aibofobia” (I taught in Portuguese) as the first of the examples list. Of course, I was not teaching how to reverse strings. I was teaching how to debug.
- rbanffy 4y agoPertinent video https://youtu.be/gAfIikFnvuI https://youtu.be/gAfIikFnvuI
- karthickgururaj 4y agoNot a palindrome, but on a related note, the crab canon by Douglas Hofstadter is a nice read (better if read in context of the book) : https://genius.com/Douglas-hofstadter-crab-canon-annotated https://genius.com/Douglas-hofstadter-crab-canon-annotated
- kevinwang 4y agoSpeaking of epic palindromes, the most impressive palindromes I've ever seen are comedian demetri Martin's: https://mobile.twitter.com/DemetriMartin/status/456114627357589505 https://mobile.twitter.com/DemetriMartin/status/456114627357... And https://users.math.yale.edu/public_html/People/frame/Fractals/Panorama/Literature/Martin/MartinPalindrome.html https://users.math.yale.edu/public_html/People/frame/Fractal...
- jhap 4y agoand Palindrome's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5F66JwLq90 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5F66JwLq90
- gnicholas 4y agoFunny, the first two lines are themselves a palindrome. Is there a word for a palindrome within a palindrome (aside from the middle, which is obviously a palindrome).
- dmurray 4y agoOne technique for making long palindromes is to start with short ones, then cut them up and rearrange them. If it works in context to add the palindrome twice, so much the better.
- msravi 4y agoA Sanskrit palindrome that relates the story of Rama when read forwards and the story of Krishna when read backwards. https://youtu.be/GPm_WX3oJgY https://youtu.be/GPm_WX3oJgY
- elevaet 4y agoThat's amazing, and very cool how the melody sounds good both directions as well. Do you know when this was written?
- offsky 4y agoIt’s a travesty that the word palindrome is not itself a palindrome.
- anthk 4y agoBarry Duncan owned a Palm once in his life, for sure.