Megapoem

[hummingwolf]

(From MegaHAL. I told y'all not to expect anything sensible from me today.)

I'm in a land of mordor where the weird shadows slant;
the wilds where the chalk-white arrows go
to last your whole world depends
on and on
whirls through the crimson leaves,
in a great big hole
power was to lift weight.
mechanical devices that replaced
my gift of endless youth.
as in office, patched and pensive,
i must turn my soul from out the door
he always looks so fine

when you start to recoil
heavy words are like tree roots
though my ghost is still dazed by the light load
of wild geese close above them
wanting so much to not be completely
mashed. The small lumps and bubbles
as the herd returned, softly mouthing
its dark corridors, making children scream.
they stand to lose so much, but don't we all.

Comments

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

Did you feed it "land of Mordor" or did it already have that in its database? That's wild! Here's an example of some random poetry I cranked out recently with a program I downloaded (my son was playing with it and cracking me up):

daisy has told me all about it
here in never-never land
she loves horses with dizzying speed
and is probably crazy
and can't feel the beat
just because i let her follow me as marked on this map
i must close my eyes
and i wonder, when did the rules change?
accusations of imprudence will make me laugh
for thousands of years

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

While MegaHAL comes with a default training file, I've created separate brains for mine which use only the stuff I've fed into it. I started out feeding the Poet brain with nursery rhymes, proverbs, and well-known poetry by Shakespeare and Poe (all of it using appropriate HTML codes for the line breaks); but quickly ended up feeding it more indiscriminately: obscure poetry, famous poetry, infamous poetry, large quantities of song lyrics, bits of garment tags ("Machine wash warm/Tumble dry medium/Wash dark & red/Colors separately"), advertisements, recipes, spam. So my Hal's utter insanity can be based on the fact that I have way too much free time on my hands. :-)

[daisydumont.livejournal.com]

Oh, fun! I'm impressed by how you're able to tailor-make the poetry. The little program I worked with can only be fed a couple of words if wanted, like a name and a color.

Cold out there this a.m. Yes!