By Alison Knowles.
One of the first computer generated poems, it consists of an indeterminate number of stanzas of four lines apiece with this structure:
1. A house of (broken dishes, steel, dust, roots, etc.)
2. In (a desert, a swamp, etc.)
3. Using (a type of lighting)
4. Inhabited by (people from many walks of life, people who sleep most of the time, people who sleep very little, birds and fish, etc.)
The program, which I've yet to track down, simply plugs in random phrases from the lists in parentheses. Sounds dumb, but was considered really hot stuff in the 1960's. |
