[HN Gopher] The computer poetry of J. M. Coetzee's early program...
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The computer poetry of J. M. Coetzee's early programming career
(2017)
Author : bluejay2
Score : 29 points
Date : 2025-11-15 18:44 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sites.utexas.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (sites.utexas.edu)
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| This is a superb piece of research, and odd that nobody has
| pulled this material before.
|
| The Atlas 2 is obviously the successor to the Atlas, which Turing
| worked on before "The Baby" at Manchester University booted up,
| at which point he quit and moved to Manchester to work on that.
|
| I seem to recall his early programs for The Baby - and his
| planned use of the Atlas - was to model "morphogens", his theory
| of how animals got their strips, spots and other markings. I
| think it was at the Science Museum in London (worth a trip for
| computer historians anyway to see Babbage's Analytical Engine,
| built in xxxx, next to a jar containing Babbage's actual brain),
| where there was a collection of printouts showing spots like on a
| Friesian cow (the most common breed of dairy cows in England).
|
| I find this diving back into early uses of computing for creative
| and scientific purposes fascinating - it's like people were just
| so excited about being able to do interesting things, they just
| dived in with the tool that they had.
|
| The poetry of Coetzee's program in this article is interesting -
| it's better, arguably, than you'd get from an LLM today. It's
| mildly mysterious, grating, intriguing but uncomfortable. A
| little like the things I remember of Coetzee's actual later
| writing (which I've not read much of, TBH).
| 2b3a51 wrote:
| It appears that Dr Coetzee was working on an important part of
| Atlas 2..
|
| > _" In 1964 Coetzee moved to IBM's British competitor ICT,
| collaborating with computer scientists at Cambridge University
| on Britain's first supercomputer, the Atlas 2. There Coetzee
| focused on multiprogramming, working on the Atlas 2's
| "supervisor," the earliest computer operating system."_
|
| Above quote from another article by Rebecca Roach at
|
| https://egomedia.supdigital.org/sections/talking-interfaces/...
|
| That article develops ideas in a literary/cultural direction.
| I'd like to have a bit more information on the algorithms
| Coetzee was using.
|
| Christopher Strachey in the early 1950s was using a program
| with combinatorial word choice to produce 'love poems'. He
| posted the printouts on notice boards and they were signed
| M.U.C for Manchester University Computer (Ferranti Mark 1).
| That seems to be a simple choice from lists subject-verb-object
| type thing.
| kragen wrote:
| The nature of the output displayed EQUIVOCAL
| HERESIARCH TAMP THE PRESBYOPIA STYPTIC ILLUSION ABSORB
| THE EIDOLA
|
| makes me think that it's a sort of mad-libs phrase generator. The
| leading adjective "PENSILE" appears twice, as does "CATAMITE",
| and "PARACLETE" occurs three times, as does the noun "EIDOLA",
| once as subject and twice as object. Hopefully Dr. Roach will be
| able to present us a full reverse-engineering of the algorithm,
| but I'm guessing you could probably infer it just from that page
| of output: f'{random.choice(adjectives)} {random.choice(nouns)}
| {random.choice(verbs)} THE {random.choice(nouns)}', which
| produces lines such as STYPTIC PARACLETE TAMP THE PRESBYOPIA.
|
| Before LLMs, I found this a very enjoyable activity; my similar
| program at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/dramaticphrase.py
| outputs lines such as: The raw wind of the
| smooth horse. An evil labyrinth of the monstrous, dying
| waters. The mere gate of deserted gardens. The
| smiling stairway of countless sweet fangs. The shattered
| witch of the diseased, ruby monk. The asphalt house of
| the smooth unicorn. A haunted fire of the sorrowful
| theft. The stainless raven of countless living gates.
| My haunted cloud beneath her glorious father. The brazen
| father of their raw villages.
|
| The comments of the program contain a somewhat embarrassing
| sonnet I wrote with its help.
|
| I also wrote a Spanish version at
| http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/frasedramatica.py, which
| says things like: Cien hijos halaguenos de la
| emocion infinita y monstruosa. Los labios caidos de
| zorros corruptos y dignos. Un exilio inmaculado dentro de
| las imprecaciones violaceas y ardientes. Los dos pies
| insepultos de mis labios profundos e infinitos. El oro
| bello de una libertad corrompida. El angustia monstruosa
| de zorros desmoronados. Aquel campo brillante de su
| princesa destrozada. Una joven emocion de un tronco
| enmascarado. El viento hermoso de su abandono griego.
| Una ley romantica del abandono destrozado.
|
| Now, of course, this sort of thing is much less novel and
| therefore less entertaining. GPT-5 will be happy to write as many
| sonnets for you as you want, as long as it doesn't somehow get
| the idea that they might infringe some kind of copyright or teach
| you how to do your own electrical work.
|
| I've often wondered if J. M. Coetzee was related to Wikipedia
| editor Derrick Coetzee with whom I used to collaborate on
| computer science articles.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| For me, Brian Westley is the greatest code poet of all. His poem
| was a winner in the 1990 round of the International Obfuscated C
| Code Competition under "Best layout - poetic exchange between
| lovers":
|
| https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ioccc-src/winner/refs/head...
|
| _Love is a not a toilet_
|
| From: https://www.ioccc.org/1990/westley/index.html
| noman-land wrote:
| This is pretty astonishing and also very fun to read.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some previous discussion:
|
| 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776042
| beloch wrote:
| For your consideration: Waka Waka Bang Splat [1]
| < > ! \* ' ' # ^ " ` $ $ - ! \* = @ $ _ % \* <
| > ~ # 4 & [ ] . . / | { , , SYSTEM HALTED
|
| [1]https://spot.colorado.edu/~sniderc/poetry/wakawaka.html
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