News last month from UC Berkeley's School of Information described a computer that writes poetry. In particular, it writes sonnets. This article describes in much detail the creation of several sonnet stanzas. This link offers the winner in Dartmouth's 2016 PoetiX sonnet-generation competition -- in which Berkeley earned a second. Here, from an article in Slate, is an example of what Berkeley's generator produced:
Kindred pens my path lies where a flock of
feast in natures mysteries an adept
you are my songs my soft skies shine above
love after my restless eyes I have kept.
Showing posts with label computer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computer. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Celebrating Ada Lovelace
Recently I have purchased the anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupying the Workplace (edited by Caroline Wright, M.L. Lyons & Eugenia Toledo, Lost Horse Press, 2015), and have found in it dozens of wonderful poems, including several that celebrate women of science. Below I offer a poem by New York poet Jo Pitkin that honors Ada Lovelace (1815-1852).
Bird, Moon, Engine by Jo Pitkin
Like a fence or a wall to keep me from harm,
tutors circled me with logic, facts, theorems.
But I hid the weeds growing wild in my mind.
By age five, I could plot the arc of a rainbow.
I could explain perpendicular and parallel.
In my mind, I heard the wind in wild weeds.
Bird, Moon, Engine by Jo Pitkin
Like a fence or a wall to keep me from harm,
tutors circled me with logic, facts, theorems.
But I hid the weeds growing wild in my mind.
By age five, I could plot the arc of a rainbow.
I could explain perpendicular and parallel.
In my mind, I heard the wind in wild weeds.
Labels:
Ada Lovelace,
Charles Babbage,
computer,
divided,
Jo Pitkin,
Lilly Ledbetter,
logic,
parallel,
perpendicular,
program,
theorem
Monday, December 30, 2013
Error Message Haiku
Found at Komplexify.com, a variety of (often-amusing) mathematical verses -- including a collection of Error Message Haiku. Approaching a New Year, I have been reflecting on my device-dependencies and considering resolutions about them -- and musing over some of these wistful substitutions for machine messages I dread:
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
Labels:
computer,
error message,
haiku,
Komplexify,
memory
Friday, June 8, 2012
Computer code -- is poetry?
Dubliner Eavan Boland is a master poet (and one of my favorites); Ireland shares her with the creative writing program at Stanford University. In Against Love Poetry (Norton, 2001), we find Boland's tribute to the also-amazing master of language, Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1988).
Code by Eavan Boland
Code by Eavan Boland
An Ode to Grace Murray Hopper 1906-88
maker of a computer compiler and verifier of COBOL
Poet to poet. I imagine you
at the edge of language, at the start of summer
in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, writing code.
You have no sense of time. No sense of minutes even.
They cannot reach inside your world,
your gray work station
with when yet now never and once.
You have missed the other seven.
This is the eight day of Creation.
Labels:
Bloomsburg University,
COBOL,
code,
compiler,
computer,
Eavan Boland,
Grace Murray Hopper,
language,
mathematician,
mathematics,
poem,
zero
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
A toast to Alan Turing
Alan Turing (1912-1954) committed suicide at the age of 42. He was brilliant, arguably the best computer scientist of the twentieth century. He is perhaps most famous for his code-breaking work at Bletchley Park during
WWII; but he also made enormous significant contributions to the emerging fields of artificial intelligence and computing. And Alan Turing was gay.
More prose details will follow -- but first a poem for Turing by UK poet Matt Harvey : Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Thinking about Thinking
The question of what it means to think is never far from my focus -- and is particularly on my mind during these days that the computer Watson is competing on the TV game show, Jeopardy. Here is a poem I like a lot -- "New Math" by Cole Swensen -- in which the poet (writing more than 20 years ago) considers the limits of computation (and whether it could aid persons unable to recognize faces).
Labels:
circle,
Cole Swensen,
computation,
compute,
computer,
equation,
Jeopardy,
math,
numerical,
point,
prosopagnosia,
Watson,
zero
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