This Month
Date 09-02-2010
GMTime 14:46:25
Banner header
Styled Plain

“This would be the best of worlds if there were no religion in it.”
Thomas Jefferson

L’année dernièr à Marienbad

Page Tags: Experimenting with Text,Never Ending Story,Last Year in Marienbad, Marienbad, Text Generator, Wind Generator, Chomsky, Story Generators
Site Tags: svg art Christianity Judaism Israelites Belief Christendom tarot Marduk sun god Persecution Hellenization CGText Joshua dhtml art the cross Adelphiasophism
Loading
Post to StumbleUpon Post to BlogMarks Post to Del.icio.us Post to Fark Post to Furl Post to Google Post to MyWeb Post to Netscape Post to NetVouz Post to Newsvine Post to Reddit Post to Scuttle Post to Shadows Post to Simpy Post to Slashdot Post to Spurl Post to Technorati Post to Wists

Text Generation

Contents

© Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Thursday, 5 February 2009

Abstract

Computer generation of text. Can it make any sense? Maybe. Maybe not. If sense is not the prime interest then it can fit its context quite well, seeming to make sense. Last Year in Marienbad is a Surrealist stream of consciousness, and the computer does it well. Religious babble does not have to make sense because it is in incomprehendable archaized language that sounds like God, and so can be seen as God speaking in mysterious ways. Most religious people accept what they read in their bibles as profound, though they cannot understand it. Literary criticism is someone’s opinion, and does not have to make sense to others, but does in bits. Literary essays are just bits of opinion strung together on a chain with little or no logic necessary. A common theme and the bits making individual sense of a kind seems to make sense in the whole. A computer can do that quite well. Check out Marienbad, our never ending story.

The Great Critic Speaks

Mr Eagle Terryton, in an oft quoted review in the Catholic-Marxist monthly, aptly wrote:

In the discussion of Byzantine diplomacy, following Gibbon, the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction is not quite equivalent in remarks such as “I read only for pleasure not wisdom” and “I’d rather eat slugs than read Proust” from dilettante readers, who have just graduated from comic books. To clarify somewhat, the heart of the subject is not to be considered in determining a necessity for anyone wishing to advance intellectually. This suggests that an unfortunate consequence of our civilization’s history is rarely given the importance of criticism to developments in social conduct. Much learned discussion on the systematic use of complex symbols does not readily tolerate the hardly perceptible politics of the animal kingdom. So, the annual literary budget will eventually break free from the fruits of diligent inspection. I suggest that status, security, fame, all of this neurotic society, does not affect the structure of results too clear to be ignored. It seems that it is, apparently, determined by an important distinction in language use. Of course, placing theory on the scales of justice and weighing it against practice is not subject to a controversial issue. Moreover, the situation that obtained just ten years ago may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate a descriptive fact. It has been said that much excellent analysis cannot be arbitrary in an abstract underlying order.
Eagle Terryton, The Armchair Lefty
Click button to refresh The Great Critic: Link

Sense or nonsense? Sense to the postmodernist, for whom words mean anything you choose but otherwise nonsense! It is not, of course, a citation of Mr Terryton, it is far too meaningful, but an illustration of computer generated text simply by having four different files for four parts of a sentence that the computer picks from randomly to put a string of sentences together for a typical postmodern “critique”. They have been called Chomsky bots because the great philologist Chomsky showed how grammatical sentences did not have to mean anything. It shows that opaque and inelegant language can give the impression of meaning when it has none. The code is simple. Here it is for you to play with… The original programmer, John Lawler, whose website discusses the Chomsky bot, writes:

What I find interesting about it is how it just hovers at the edge of understandability, a sort of semantic mumbling, a fog for the mind’s eye.

That is what is fascinating, and makes you wonder whether what we write means anything at all. Much of it it probably does not! Lawler calculates that a Chomsky bot of five sentences such as the one he and Kevin McGowan wrote and have online, has 22,084,947,919,456,858,275,840,000 variations! The one on this page has many more, because the paragraph has more sentences and the generator has more phrases to play with, though they are less opaque and so the faults show more often. Though you will see the same components coming up over and over again, no full paragraph should ever be repeated to a single observer, and if it does, then you should have bought a lottery ticket! Kevin McGowan’s code in Perl is called fogcode.html, and is available to download from a search.

Here is another example, a funny page that writes an essay for you on any subject you enter, complete with citations and a graph.

Last uploaded: 23 November, 2009.

Interact

Other Websites or Blogs

Short Responses and Suggestions

* Required.  No spam




New. No comments posted here yet. Be the first one!

Before you go, think about this…

Darwin gave an adequate account of the design in living beings without resorting to theology at all. Natural selection of random variations could explain lifes design, provided that there is enough time. And time there has been in abundance. The vast amount of time in which change can occur randomly and piecemeal in evolutionary history eliminates the need for God’s interventions. Thus, any return today to a natural theology built around the notion of divine design in living beings will seem unreasonable to those who are fully aware of deep time and Darwinian evolution.
John F Haught, Professor of Theology, Georgetown University, Washington DC

Who is God? Paul or Christ?

Give or take a few, it’s been 23770 months since the first coming of Christ ended. The Rapture can’t be long now… Can it?

AskWhy! Books

Support independent publishers and writers snubbed by big retailers.
Ask your public library to order these books.
Available through all good bookshops

Get them cheaper
Direct Order Form
Get them cheaper


© All rights reserved

Who Lies Sleeping?

Who Lies Sleeping? cover
Who Lies Sleeping?
The Dinosaur Heritage and the Extinction of Man
ISBN 0-9521913-0-X £7.99

The Mystery of Barabbas

Mystery of Barabbas cover
The Mystery of Barabbas.
Exploring the Origins of a Pagan Religion
ISBN 0-9521913-1-8 £9.99

The Hidden Jesus

Hidden Jesus cover
The Hidden Jesus.
The Secret Testament Revealed
ISBN 0-9521913-2-6 £12.99

These pages are for use!

Creative Commons License
This work by Dr M D Magee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.askwhy.co.uk/.

This material may be freely used except to make a profit by it! Articles on this website are published and © Mike Magee and AskWhy! Publications except where otherwise attributed. Copyright can be transferred only in writing: Library of Congress: Copyright Basics.

Conditions

Permission to copy for personal use is granted. Teachers and small group facilitators may also make copies for their students and group members, providing that attribution is properly given. When quoting, suggested attribution format:

Author, AskWhy! Publications Website, “Page Title”, Updated: day, month, year, www .askwhy .co .uk / subdomains / page .php

Adding the date accessed also will help future searches when the website no longer exists and has to be accessed from archives… for example…

Dr M D Magee, AskWhy! Publications Website, “Sun Gods as Atoning Saviours” Updated: Monday, May 07, 2001, www.askwhy .co .uk / christianity / 0310sungod .php (accessed 5 August, 2007)

Electronic websites please link to us at http://www.askwhy.co.uk or to major contents pages, if preferred, but we might remove or rename individual pages. Pages may be redisplayed on the web as long as the original source is clear. For commercial permissions apply to AskWhy! Publications.

All rights reserved.
▼ Contract All | ▲ Expand All

Website Summary

Themes

Exodus

The Resurrection

Evolution

Search

Popularity


AskWhy! Blogger

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

My Blog Log

IP Address Lookup
Open Standards Add Feed to Google

Visitor Map
The Wisdom of Carl
Scripture is said to be divinely inspired, but what if it is simply made up by fallible humans? Miracles are attested, but what if they are some mix of charlatanry, unfamiliar states of consciousness, misapprehension of natural phenomena and mental illness?
Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World (1996)

Join the blue ribbon online free speech campaign
Join the blue ribbon online free speech campaign!