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., ...

wrote a combinatory love letter algorithm for the

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 operat ...

computer in 1952. The poems it generated have been seen as the first work of

electronic 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 constr ...

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 ''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 i ...

. 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.

Reception

Strachey wrote about his interest in how “a rather simple trick” can produce an illusion that the computer is thinking, and that “these tricks can lead to quite unexpected and interesting results”.

External links

Re-implementation in PHP

by

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 ...

References

Digital art Love poems Love letters {{postmodern-art-stub Electronic literature works