Strachey Love Letter Algorithm
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Strachey Love Letter Algorithm
Christopher Strachey wrote a combinatory love letter algorithm for the Manchester Mark 1 computer in 1952. The poems it generated have been seen as the first work of electronic literature and a queer critique of heteronormative expressions of love. The algorithm Rather than modeling writing as a creative process, the love letter algorithm represents the writing of love letters as formulaic and ''without'' creativity. The algorithm has the following structure: # Print two words taken from a list of salutations # Do the following 5 times: ## Choose one of two sentence structures depending on a random value Rand ## Fill the sentence structure from lists of adjectives, adverbs, substantives, and verbs. # Print the letter's closing The lists of words were compiled by Strachey from a Roget's Thesaurus. Although the list of words included several variations on the word ''love'', none of these variations made it into any of the widely circulated letters generated by Strachey's procedure. ...
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Christopher Strachey
Christopher S. Strachey (; 16 November 1916 – 18 May 1975) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing.F. J. Corbató, et al., The Compatible Time-Sharing System A Programmer's Guide' (MIT Press, 1963) . "the first paper on time-shared computers by C. Strachey at the June 1959 UNESCO Information Processing conference" He has also been credited as possibly being the first developer of a video game. He was a member of the Strachey family, prominent in government, arts, administration, and academia. Early life and education Christopher Strachey was born on 16 November 1916 to Oliver Strachey and Rachel (Ray) Costelloe in Hampstead, England. Oliver Strachey was the son of Richard Strachey and the great grandson of Sir Henry Strachey, 1st Baronet. His elder sister was the writer Barbara Strachey. In 1919, the family moved to 51 Gordon Square. The Stracheys belonge ...
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Manchester Mark 1
The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester, England from the Manchester Baby (operational in June 1948). Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operational by April 1949; a program written to search for Mersenne primes ran error-free for nine hours on the night of 16/17 June 1949. The machine's successful operation was widely reported in the British press, which used the phrase "electronic brain" in describing it to their readers. That description provoked a reaction from the head of the University of Manchester's Department of Neurosurgery, the start of a long-running debate as to whether an electronic computer could ever be truly creative. The Mark 1 was to provide a computing resource within the university, to allow researchers to gain experience in the practical use of computers, but it very quickly also became a prototype on which the design of Ferranti's commercial version could ...
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Digital Literature
Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from computation", "work that could only exist in the space for which it was developed/written/coded—the digital space". This means that these writings cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the text are unable to be carried over onto a printed version. As Di Rosario et al. 2021 note "Electronic literature is a digital-oriented literature, but the reader should not confuse it with digitized print literature." Definitions N. Katherine Hayles defines electronic literature as "'digital born' (..) and (usually) meant to be read on a computer", clarifying that this does not include e-books and digitised print literature. A definition offered by the Electronic ...
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Roget's Thesaurus
''Roget's Thesaurus'' is a widely used English-language thesaurus, created in 1805 by Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869), British physician, natural theologian and lexicographer. History It was released to the public on 29 April 1852. Roget was inspired by the Utilitarian teachings of Jeremy Bentham and wished to help "those who are painfully groping their way and struggling with the difficulties of composition ..this work processes to hold out a helping hand." The Karpeles Library Museum houses the original manuscript in its collection. Roget's schema of classes and their subdivisions is based on the philosophical work of Leibniz (see ), itself following a long tradition of epistemological work starting with Aristotle. Some of Aristotle's Categories are included in Roget's first class "abstract relations." Content Roget described his thesaurus in the foreword to the first edition: ''Roget's Thesaurus'' is composed of six primary classes. Each class is composed of multip ...
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Nick Montfort
Nick Montfort is a poet and professor of digital media at MIT, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen where he leads a node on computational narrative systems at the Center for Digital Narrative. Among his publications are seven books of computer-generated literature and six books from the MIT Press, several of which are collaborations. His work also includes digital projects, many of them in the form of short programs. He lives in New York City. Computer-generated books Montfort's ''The Truelist'' (Counterpath, 2017) is a computer-generated book-length poem produced by a one-page computer program. The code is included at the end of the book. Montfort has also done a complete studio recording reading ''The Truelist,'' available at PennSound. Among Montfort's computer-generated books is ''#!'' (pronounced "shebang"), in which he "chooses the programming languages Python, Ruby, and Perl (the last of which has ...
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Digital Art
Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process, or more specifically computational art that uses and engages with digital media. Since the 1960s, various names have been used to describe digital art, including computer art, multimedia art and new media art. History John Whitney, a pioneer of computer graphics, developed the first computer-generated art in the early 1960s by utilizing mathematical operations to create art. In 1963, Ivan Sutherland invented the first user interactive computer-graphics interface known as Sketchpad. Andy Warhol created digital art using a Commodore Amiga where the computer was publicly introduced at the Lincoln Center, New York, in July 1985. An image of Debbie Harry was captured in monochrome from a video camera and digitized into a graphics program called ProPaint. Warhol manipulated the image by adding color by using flood fills. After some initial resistan ...
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Love Poems
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle. Poetry has a long and varied history, evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa and to panegyric and elegiac court poetry of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta River valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poetry, the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'', was written in Sumerian. Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese ''Shijing'', as well as religious hymns (the Sanskrit ''R ...
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Love Letters
A love letter is an expression of love in written form. However delivered, the letter may be anything from a short and simple message of love to a lengthy explanation and description of feelings. History One of the oldest references to a love letter dates to Indian mythology of more than 5000 years ago. Mentioned in the Bhagavatha Purana, book 10, chapter 52, it is addressed by princess Rukmini to king Krishna and carried to him by her Brahmin messenger Sunanda. Examples from Ancient Egypt range from the most formal, and possibly practical – "The royal widow . . . Ankhesenamun wrote a letter to the king of the Hittites, Egypt's old enemy, begging him to send one of his sons to Egypt to marry her" – to the down-to-earth: Let me "bathe in thy presence, that I may let thee see my beauty in my tunic of finest linen, when it is wet". A fine expression of literary skill can be found in Imperial China: when a heroine, faced with an arranged marriage, wrote to her c ...
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