In 1952,

Christopher Strachey Christopher S. Strachey (; 16 November 1916 – 18 May 1975) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design and computer time-sharing.F. J. Corbató, et al., T ...

wrote a combinatory algorithm for the

Manchester Mark 1 The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester, England from the Manchester Baby (operational in June 1948). Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operat ...

computer which could create

love letter A love letter is an expression of love in written form. However delivered, the letter may be anything from a short and simple message of love to a lengthy explanation and description of feelings. History One of the oldest references to a l ...

s. The poems it generated have been seen as the first work of

electronic literature Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature where digital capabilities such as interactivity, multimodality or Generative literature, algorithmic text generation are used aesthetically. Works of electronic literature ar ...

and a queer critique of

heteronormative Heteronormativity is the definition of heterosexuality as the normative human sexuality. It assumes the gender binary (i.e., that there are only two distinct, opposite genders) and that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between peo ...

expressions of love.

History

Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer ...

's biographer Andrew Hodges dates the creation of the love letter generator, also known as ''M.U.C.'', to the summer of 1952, when Strachey was working with Turing, although Gaboury dates its creation to 1953. Hodges writes that while many of their colleagues thought ''M.U.C.'' silly, “it greatly amused Alan and Christopher Strachey – whose love lives, as it happened, were rather similar too”. Strachey was known to be gay. Although this appears to be the first work of computer-generated literature, the structure is similar to the nineteenth-century parlour game

Consequences Consequence may refer to: Philosophy, science and social sciences * Logical consequence, also known as a ''consequence relation'', or ''entailment'' * Consequent, in logic, the second half of a hypothetical proposition or consequences * Consequent ...

, and the early twentieth-century surrealist game exquisite corpse. The Mad Libs books were conceived around the same time as Strachey wrote the love letter generator. It was also preceded by John Clark's Latin Verse Machine (1830-1843), the first automated text generator.

Output

In a 1954 paper, Strachey gave one of just a few extant examples of the kinds of love letter the program would generate:

Darling Sweetheart, You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking. Yours beautifully M. U. C.

The original program is lost, but was reimplemented by

Nick Montfort Nick Montfort is an American computer scientist and poet who is a professor of digital media at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs a lab called The Trope Tank. He also holds a part-time position at the University of Bergen whe ...

in 2014. In an article on the love letter generator in the

New Yorker New Yorker may refer to: * A resident of New York: ** A resident of New York City and its suburbs *** List of people from New York City ** A resident of the New York (state), State of New York *** Demographics of New York (state) * ''The New Yor ...

the structure of each letter is described thus: "you are my djective oun my djective oun dverb erbsyour djective oun"

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 ''Roget's Thesaurus'' is a widely used English-language thesaurus, created in 1805 by Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869), British physician, natural theologian and lexicographer. History It was released to the public on 29 April 1852. Roget was ...

. Although 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.

Reception

Strachey wrote about his interest in how “a rather simple trick” can produce an illusion that the computer is thinking, and that “these tricks can lead to quite unexpected and interesting results”. Jacob Gaboury argues that the love letter generator exposes the impersonality of love, showing that "the false veneer lying at the heart of that most deeply human emotion is pure camp: an exultant love of the artificial".

References

{{Reflist

External links

2010 re-implementation in PHP
by Matt Sephton

by

Digital art Love poems Love letters 1950s electronic literature works Generative literature British electronic literature works Random text generation