Christopher Strachey wrote a combinatory love letter algorithm for the Manchester Mark 1 computer in 1952. The poems it generated have been seen as the first piece of digital literature 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. Interestingly, though 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.
References
Strachey Love Letter algorithm Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA