5 ms·

I'm reminded of the library of babel in Louis Borges fiction. If you generated every possible iambic meter poem and then sifted through them with some mechanism

• nswanberg 14y ago
  That sounds like what happens with poets and collected culture now--a poet looking to create a poem searches their memory for experience, chooses a form, and after some revisions produces a work. That work is then shopped around, sometimes in formal ways like a publisher, or informal through friends, and through time civilization filters and canonized certain poems, forever adding to, updating, and removing works from the list. It seems possible, though certainly not easy, to mechanize some or all of that.
  • unimpressive 14y ago
    Exactly, poetry has enough structure that unlike regular English prose, it seem plausible that you could get meaningful output from a computer program. Then again, meaningful output isn't exactly necessary.[0] [0]: http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html
• abecedarius 14y ago
  You want every possible sonnet? OK: http://wry.me/sonnetron http://wry.me/sonnetron (slight exaggeration, yes.)
• Wingman4l7 14y ago
  This reminds me of the Roald Dahl short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, which, although dated, examines the possible consequences of automatically generating literature. I also think of the sci-fi short story Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson, which examines how perpetual copyright would negatively impact music (there are only so many novel melodies that are pleasant to listen to): http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm