A script for poets

[Gary Kline]

On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 04:49:47PM -0600, illoai at gmail.com wrote:
> On 2/8/06, Gary Kline <kline at tao.thought.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 08:29:21PM +0100, Kristian Vaaf wrote:
> > > Again with my script requests, this time I'm wondering if anybody
> > > has ever felt like writing a shell script that makes it easy to write
> > > rhymes,
> > > poems or just make up funny lines.
> 
> As below, but textproc/dadadodo is about it so
> far as meaningfulness in computer generated
> text can get.
> 
> >
> >         This may dovetail into something I was actively working on
> >         several years ago: a C/C++ program that took unmetered text
> >         as input and output N-syllabic lines as output.
> >
> . . .
> 
> Quite the task, that.  Reading Spenser, Shakespeare,
> and older metrical and rhyming poetry can give you
> an indication of how difficult even the bland, mechanical
> regurgiation of poetry can be:
> Most words ending in -ed have one more syllable than
> we usually enunciate.
> Room and Rome can rhyme.
> Wawain, Gawain, Gawaine are exactly the same person.
> 
> Most of this can be scripted around, double entries in
> the syllabary for possible pronunciations and known
> obscure rhymes, etc.  Still leaves no way to innovate
> structure that's not coded in.
> Anyway, this gets into AI, and as jwz points out, most of
> modern AI research is fairly intellectually dishonest.
> 

	Yeh, given the way the English has stolen, borrowed 
	words from Everywhere--and still is--it just makes
	sense to spend a few years taking poetry classes 
	than invest decades trying to invent an AI tool.

	Poetry, creativity, philosophy (for starters) are 
	just a few areas where we poor humans still beat 
	any program.  Thanks the gods.


	gary

	PS:  among my Jottings stuff I dreamed up something 
	     like:  "the reign of depression" ... .   AI?
	     Foo!


> 

-- 
   Gary Kline     kline at thought.org   www.thought.org     Public service Unix