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KF5JRV > TECH 12.05.16 12:22l 74 Lines 3904 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: First Computer Written Book
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Sent: 160512/1117Z 2799@KF5JRV.#NWAR.AR.USA.NA BPQ1.4.65
The First Book Written by a Computer Program 1984
Detail from cover of The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, the first book
written by a computer program. Please click on image to see image of entire
cover of book.
In 1984 American writer and programmer William Chamberlain of New York
published The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed, a volume of prose and
poetry that, except for Chamberlain's introduction, was entirely written by a
computer program called RACTEROff that had been developed by
Chamberlain with Thomas Etter. The program was given credit for authorship on
the title page which read: The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed. Computer
Prose and Poetry by Racter. Illustrations by Joan Hall. Introduction by
William Chamberlain. The bright red cover of the paperback stated that this
was "The First Book Ever Written by a Computer." It also called it "A Bizarre
and Fantastic Journey into the Mind of a Machine." The blurb stated that the
book contained:
"• Poetry and limericks
"• Imaginatige Dialogues
"• Aphorisms
"• Interviewss
"• The published short story , "Soft Ions" and more.
"You are about to enter a strange, deranged, and awesome world of images and
fantasies– the 'thoughts' of the most advanced prose-creating computer program
today."
The program, the name of which was an abbreviation for raconteur, could
generate grammatically consistent sentences with the help of a pre-coded
grammar template. Although certainly readable in the sense that each sentence
displayed a competent grammar, any anxiety that the program could replace
human authors would have been put to rest after a single glance at the
computer-generated narrative:
"At all events my own essays and dissertations about love and its endless pain
and perpetual pleasure will be known and understood by all of you who read
this and talk or sing or chant about it to your worried friends or nervous
enemies. Love is the question and the subject of this essay. We will commence
with a question: does steak love lettuce? This question is implacably hard and
inevitably difficult to answer. Here is a question: does an electron love a
proton, or does it love a neutron? Here is a question: does a man love a woman
or, to be specific and to be precise, does Bill love Diane? The interesting
and critical response to this question is: no! He is obsessed and infatuated
with her. He is loony and crazy about her. That is not the love of steak and
lettuce, of electron and proton and neutron. This dissertation will show that
the love of a man and a woman is not the love of steak and lettuce. Love is
interesting to me and fascinating to you but it is painful to Bill and Diane.
That is love!"
According to Chamberlain's introduction to the book, RACTER ran on a CP/M
machine. It was written in "compiled BASIC on a Z80 micro with 64K of RAM."
The book was imaginatively published by Warner Books, extensively illustrated
with black and white collages combining 19th century imagery with computer
graphics by New York artist Joan Hall.
Describing the "author," the book stated on its first preliminary page:
"The Author: Racter (the name is short for raconteur) is the most highly
developed artificial writer in the field of prose synthesis today.
Fundamentally different from artifical intelligence programming, which tries
to replicate human thinking, Racter can write original work without promptings
from a human operator. And according to its programmer, 'Once it's running,
Racter needs no input from the outside world. It's just cooking by itself.'
Racter's work has appeared in OMNI magazine and in 1983 was the subject of a
special exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York. Now at work on a first
novel, Racter operates on an IMS computer in New York's Greenwich Village,
where it shares an apartment with a human computer programmer.
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