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Unread 04-21-2012, 11:19 PM
Uche Ogbuji Uche Ogbuji is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: Superior, Colorado, USA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by W.F. Lantry View Post
Somewhere out there some english major who knows how to code is staring at a screen right now. Her idea of poetry doesn't begin and end with Jabberwocky, a coder favorite. And she doesn't care about the silly pop culture stuff this Bok guy is writing about. She's hard coding for hard lit. And when we see what she's doing, she's going to blow us away with what she can achieve...
I don't care really about all that 20th century whinge, because my attitude is live and let live. People can write all the Dada/Surrealist/whatever crap they like. It's ain't the end of literature or anything because I'm still writing what *I* like, and others are as well.

However, as to your claim above. I call BS. I am a pretty damned good programmer, though I do say so myself. LISP? Sure. I've done AI work in LISP, Smalltalk, Scheme, Prolog, Haskell and more. I've also done a lot of more general-purpose programming in Assembler, C, Objective C, C++, Java, Python, etc. You mention checkers-learning programs. Funny thing. I wrote a program in college to learn how to play checkers using a bit of my own hybrid between genetic algorithms and simulated annealing. You mention what I presume are trigrams and higher nth-order text generators? Yep, I've coded more than my fair share of those as well, and had fun feeding them with text corpora from Prodigy, Usenet, Project Gutenberg, etc. It looks to me as if you've pretty much ticked off the standard list of things that any undergrad with an AI interest has dabbled in. I'd just add Eliza and perhaps a frame-based expert system in a field of the student's interest.

Here's the thing, though: Those are all toys. Computers are nowhere near the slightest glimmer of a prospect of replacing the humanities. Not. Even. Close. Mind you, MacCarthy, Turing, and even taking a step back to von Neumann, all these esteemed and brilliant individuals thought that it was just a matter of a few more MIPS and a bit more core storage here and there before computers would be taking over human creative tasks. They lived to admit just how wrong they were. There is a fundamental quiddity we are missing entirely before such a breakthrough would be possible. I'm not saying it will never happen. We're just cell assembly, and even the most sophisticated assembly can eventually be reverse-engineered. Hey maybe Skynet is indeed on the way. The point, however, is that we're not even close yet, and there is almost certainly no English major with coding skills or Computer scientist with humanities chops sitting at a screen somewhere out there now on the verge of replacing *decent* poets.

Sky ain't falling, so folks should feel free to hate anti-humanistic "writing" as much as they please without being accused of ludditism.
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