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January 10, 2020 08:10 pm

Machines Are Learning To Write Poetry.

Dan Rockmore, writing for New Yorker: There are more resonances between programming and poetry than you might think. Computer science is an art form of words and punctuation, thoughtfully placed and goal-oriented, even if not necessarily deployed to evoke surprise or longing. Laid out on a page, every program uses indentations, stanzas, and a distinctive visual hierarchy to convey meaning. In the best cases, a close-reader of code will be rewarded with a sense of awe for the way ideas have been captured in words. Programming has its own sense of minimalist aesthetics, born of the imperative to create software that doesn't take up much space and doesn't take long to execute. Coders seek to express their intentions in the fewest number of commands; William Carlos Williams, with his sparse style and simple, iconic images, would appreciate that. One poet's "road not taken" is one programmer's "if-then-else" statement. Generations of coders have taken their first steps by finding different ways to say "Hello, World." Arguably, you could say the same for poets. Many programmers have links to poetry -- Ada Lovelace, the acknowledged first programmer ever, was Lord Byron's daughter -- but it's a challenge to fully bridge the gap. Sonnets occupy something of a sweet spot: they're a rich art form (good for poets) with clear rules (good for machines). Ranjit Bhatnagar, an artist and programmer, appreciates both sides. In 2012, he invented Pentametron, an art project that mines the Twittersphere for tweets in iambic pentameter. First, using a pronouncing dictionary created at Carnegie Mellon, he built a program to count syllables and recognize meter. Then, with a separate piece of code to identify rhymes, he started to assemble sonnets. For the first National Novel Generation Month (NaNoGenMo), in 2013, Bhatnagar submitted "I got a alligator for a pet!," a collection of five hundred and four sonnets created with Pentametron. Bhatnagar's code required that each line be an entire tweet, or essentially one complete thought (or at least what counts as a thought on Twitter). It also did its best to abide by strict rules of meter and rhyme.

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