I am trying to rewrite my xml/rss parser and add new functionality to it. I am using a lot of the algorithms that spambots use to cut and shuffle text. This is the most coherent output I’ve gotten thus far:
Between the high and the low, in this night, laying a ghost, Jeannette and the spirit became one. They whirled snow heaped up by whirled snow, and off the white smoke swims. Choices. Mère and Père, undreaming even of fields of gold. The weight of being born into exile is lifted. Mère and Père are walking away from the desert. Smeerenburg and the Whale-Oil Rush, a pallid yellow lingers beyond the frame of glided twilight. Père and Mère could be in conversation, searching for a fox whose den I cannot find.
Appendices. Whiteness. Those impediments that rise like an old soldier, wakeful, in his tent!
A salamander scuttles across the quiet to restaurants for Early Bird Specials. The food will melt the spirit; his mouth will distend.
Trying to get computer to write stuff for you is really hard work. I was at this goddamned fundie site this weekend that I stumbled across looking for code snippets, which basically was trying to debunk evolution via mutation via showing how character changes in a sentence do not lead to readable text. It made me angry.
To coach a computer into making words that make sense, you have to teach it the boundaries of language. The same way that a mutant fish with no legs that suddenly grew lungs and no gills would never reproduce, words without vowels and parseable context would not survive. However, words with slightly different spellings or nuance, which change meaning or use over time – those are the real snapper turtles.
What I am trying to do is get the algorithm to spit back meaningful sentences, made from snippets within the text warehouse. Eventually, I want it to be able to answer questions with self-written passages. I’m basically trying to make an electronic oracle. It is a longstanding project of mine, which has existed, in one form or another, since I read Foucault’s Pendulum in 1990.
Even though I think Eco stole some from the Illuminati Trilogy, he took it in an original direction. Pendulum changed my life. I hope, someday, Abulafia will too.