DARLING DEAR
YOU ARE MY LOVING LUST: MY BEAUTIFUL HUNGER. MY AFFECTION LUSTS FOR YOUR WINNING HEART. YOU ARE MY DEVOTED FERVOUR: MY SYMPATHETIC LONGING.
YOURS AFFECTIONATELY
M. U. C.
... and people say the British are not romantic.
One of the earliest electronic computers, I recently discovered, was used to write love poetry. The Manchester Mark 1 was programmed by Christopher Strachey with the Loveletters
program in 1952. (The letter above was outputted shortly before I wrote this blog post, by a Mark 1 emulator running the same program.) The Loveletters
program constructs partially random sentences from a limited, but affectionate, vocabulary. Since many of the early electronic and electromechanical computers were motivated by military concerns, it's nice to see that the Mark 1 was used for something a little less combative.
Computer-generated partially random texts may no longer be very novel, but they are becoming increasingly sophisticated. The most engaging example I've seen so far, SCIgen, was written in 2005, and it generates scientific
papers, based on a vocabulary of computer science terms. It's realistic to the point of satire - try it here, and be sure to click the Generate another one
link when you want to see another paper
. Incredibly, some of the texts it has generated have been accepted as submissions for supposedly reputable academic conferences and journals.