Racter
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- More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity.
- I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.
- I need it for my dreams.
- -- Allegedly written by Racter, from The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed
Racter was an artificial intelligence computer program that generated English language prose at random. The name of the program is short for raconteur. Its existence was revealed to the world in 1984. Its seeming sophistication, however, proved to have been a hoax.
Racter was written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. The existence of the program was revealed in a book called The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed, which was allegedly composed entirely by the program. According to Chamberlain's introduction to the book, the program apparently ran on a CP/M machine; it was written in "compiled BASIC on a Z80 micro with 64K of RAM." This version, the program that allegedly wrote the book, was not released to the general public.
However, in 1984 Mindscape, Inc. released an interactive version of Racter for DOS and Apple II computers. The published Racter was a chatterbot. The BASIC program that was released by Mindscape was far less sophisticated than anything that could have written the fairly sophisticated prose of The Policeman's Beard. The commercial version of Racter was essentially a computerized version of Mad Libs, the game in which you fill in the blanks in advance and then plug them into a text template to produce a surrealistic tale. The commercial program attempted to parse text inputs, identifying significant nouns and verbs, which it would then regurgitate, mixed with random inputs, to create "conversations." The outputs were occasionally amusing, but would never pass the Turing test.
By contrast, the text in The Policeman's Beard, if generated by the Racter program at all, would have been the product of Chamberlain's own specialized templates, none of which were included in the commercial release of the program. Unfortunately, the text in The Policeman's Beard seems instead to have been the work of Chamberlain's editing or own imagination.
External links
- Racter (http://www.mobygames.com/game/sheet/gameId=563) info page at MobyGames
- The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed (http://www.ubu.com/concept/racter.html) selections
- Getting a Computer to Write About Itself (http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/write_about_itself.php) by Bill Chamberlain
- A Racter Postscript (http://www.inu.org/scherzi/200004/entry4.htm)