405 Love Letters

[hugovk]

My second NaNoGenMo 2015 entry is an epistolary novel of love letters (and the second entry inspired by D004x).

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Christopher Strachey has been named the first digital artist; the first to make literary or artistic use of a computer.

A colleague of Alan Turing, in 1952 Strachey was a programmer of the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer, the Ferranti Mark 1, also known as the Manchester University Computer.

According to by Noah Wardrip-Fruin:

Christopher Strachey is rightly viewed as a pioneer of modern computing. He’s not usually, however, viewed as the creator of the first work of digital literature. Research toward my submission for DAC, however, has lead me to believe that he was — and that his initial digital literature project was also, quite probably, the first piece of digital art.

...

That [1952] summer he developed — with some aesthetic advice from his sister Barbara, using Turing’s random number generator, and perhaps in collaboration with Turing — a Mark I program that created combinatory love letters. This was the first piece of digital literature, and of digital art, predating by a decade the earliest examples of digital computer art from recent surveys (e.g., quite useful books such as Christiane Paul’s Digital Art and Stephen Wilson’s Information Arts).

Strachey described the love letters in a 1954 article entitled The "Thinking" Machine, published in the literary journal Encounter:

IN SPITE of a certain impression of rather Victorian Babu, I think there is very little doubt of the intention of these letters:

Darling Sweetheart You are my avid fellow tiding. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for ),our heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking. Yours beautifully M.U.C.

Honey Dear My sympathetic affection beautifully attracts your affectionate enthusiasm. You are my loving adoration: my breathless adoration. My fellow feeling breathlessly hopes for your dear eagerness. My lovesick adoration cherishes your avid ardour. Yours wistfully M.U.C.

The Manchester University Computer (hence the irreverent signature) can type out letters like this at the rate of about one a minute for hours without ever repeating itself. The scheme on which it works, however, is almost childishly simple. Apart from the beginning and the ending of the letters, there are only two basic types of sentence. The first is "My — (adj.) ~ (noun) — (adv.) — (verb) your — (adj.) ~ (noun)." There are lists appropriate adjectives, nouns, adverbs, and verbs from which the blanks are filled in at random. There is also a further random choice as to whether or not the adjectives and adverb are included at all. The second type is simply "You are my — (adj.) — (noun)," and this case the adjective is always present. There is a random choice of which type of sentence is to be used, but if there are two consecutive sentences of the second type, the first ends with a colon (unfortunately the teleprinter of the computer had no comma) and the initial "You are" of the second is omitted. The letter starts with two words chosen from special lists ; there are then five sentences of one of the two basic types, and the letter ends "Yours — (adv.) M. U. C."

There are many obvious imperfections in this scheme (indeed very little thought went into its devising) and the fact that the vocabulary was largely based on Roget’s Thesaurus lends a very peculiar flavour to the results. The chief point of interest, however, is not the obvious crudity of the scheme, nor even in ways in which it might be improved, but in the remarkable simplicity of the plan when compared with the diversity of the letters it produces. It is clear that these letters are produced by a rather simple trick and that the computer is not really "thinking" at all. This is true of all programs which make the computer appear to think; on analysis they are nothing more than rather complicated tricks. However, sometimes these tricks can lead to quite unexpected and interesting results.

Using Strachey's description, I reimplemented his love-letter generator in Python (using the word lists from this PHP version).

Running on a Macbook Pro, it can generate some half a million per minute, compared with Manchester University Computer's rate of one per minute. (Well, this isn't quite a fair comparison: the MUC outputted to paper whereas the MBP just saved to disk.)

My NaNoGenMo entry goes further: it starts out as simple five-line love letters following Strachey. But as the pages turn, the letters become more and more absurd as more and more words are instead taken at random from the Wordnik dictionary. And towards the middle of the book the letters become longer, up to 120 lines long, before settling back down to five lines at the end.

In the HTML version, clicking a word takes you to another letter containing that word.

[mattfister]

This is beautifully done. I really like the hypertext additions to jump between letters with the same words.

[greg-kennedy]

Oh my god, some highlights from the end

Annelid bag-holder, My noops mislikes your dikes. Yours sluttishly,

and

Yours monosyllabically, M. U. C.

[hugovk]

Yes, "Yours monosyllabically" before the three initials is a nice touch :)