In his 1677 book Artificial Versifying, the English mathematician John Peter describes a simple procedure that can be used “to make almost Six hundred thousand different Latine Verses.” By drawing letters from a set of tables in a certain pattern, one can produce grammatically and metrically correct verses whether one understands Latin or not. This … Read more
Way back in 2003, I created Homespring, an absurdist esoteric programming language that has since taken on something of a life of its own. It attracted a bit of attention on the Internet in May, 2018, so I figured I would put up a new page about it. A Homespring program takes the form of … Read more
UPDATE 2020: I have since made a much more advanced program along these lines using neural networks. The Depoeticizer changes a text to bring it more in line with the expectations created by a statistical language model. Specifically, it uses an ngram model—the same kind that underlies both autocorrect and Markov-chain nonsense generators like the … Read more
Update 2024: The Twitter bot was shut down last year due to API policy changes. In her 1855 autobiography, Harriet Martineau recounts a meeting with Samuel Taylor Coleridge near the end of his life: I am glad to have seen his weird face, and heard his dreamy voice; and my notion of possession, prophecy,—of involuntary … Read more