Computer Poets Not Half Bad

Using “Markov chains” and “pulling text from Project Gutenberg,” Paul Thompson wrote (er, “wrote”) computer-generated “snowball” poems in which each word is one letter longer than the last.

Others joined in, and now there’s even a Twitter bot spinning verse out of 0s and 1s.

Some of the results don’t quite make sense, but others are surprisingly good. For example:

I

am

the

time

Alice

forced

herself

together

or

i

am

the

dawn

light

before

anybody

expected

anything

disorderly