The race we make computers run is aimed at making them our inseparable companions in various activities, but we also often put them to "compete against us" in many others, testing how human our inventions can be. In 1983, Racter was created, a text generator in BASIC, which resulted in "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed", the first book written by a computer. The book shows us poems, stories, dialogues and other literary forms semantically disordered, but with intensive curation work.
Literature has relied on human imagination, syntax and prose of the thousands of writers who have passed through our history. Fantasy, essay, scientific, romantic and many other genres push to gain space in libraries, but if you have "The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed" in science fiction literature, you should remove it from there and put it in your electronic literature selection. We are not talking about ebooks, but about the first book written by a computer.
Not long ago we told you about the chapter of "Harry Potter" written by an artificial intelligence, which wasn't that great. These days, we also learned about the first YouTube channel with music created by an artificial intelligence, broadcasting 24 hours, which could easily be mistaken for music written by a human. Not to mention the paintings created by neural networks. But the matter of computers participating in the arts, and more specifically writing books, is much older than you might imagine...
The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed
In 1984, The Policeman’s beard is half constructed was published and almost went unnoticed except for a small circle of specialists and informed people about the event that you are probably finding out about more than 30 years later. This 57-page story illustrated by Joan Hall, was known as the first book written by a computer. The project was in charge of writers William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter, who had created Racter, a text generator in BASIC on a 64kb z80 computer that had the particularity of producing correct prose in also correct English. However, there was a problem to solve (or not) and that was that the semantics of sentences and phrases were a bit distorted.
This last issue prevented correlation and coherence between much of what was said in the book, so only one story qualified as such, and the genre was science fiction. Since this was only a small story, the book was completed with limericks-style poems, also written by Racter, which are stanzas of five lines with AABBA rhymes, comments, interviews, dialogues and even aphorisms. Everything was valid for the computer to express itself, it seems.
And although its English was excellent, its way of concatenating words was strange and useless in operational terms, so Joan Hall's drawings helped understanding the context or disguised it to make it intelligible. Of course, the curation of the content must have been extensive, and that's how only the most coherent prose remained from the hundreds that Racter must have created. Our favorite poem? The one that follows...
"More than iron, more than lead, more than gold, I need electricity. I need it more than lamb, pork, lettuce or cucumber. I need it for my dreams."
As for the poem above, "More than iron, more than lead, more than gold, I need electricity. I need it more than lamb, pork, lettuce or cucumber. I need it for my dreams.", it's one of the most coherent pieces. Interested in reading the complete work? You can download the PDF from this link, with Joan Hall's drawings, or read a plain text version from Archive.org. The introduction by Bill Chamberlain, the only thing in the book written by a human, explains the methodology used and the motivation behind such a creation. Unmissable.
