Love Poetry Generator

Anyone who has ever used magnetic words to write poetry on their fridge will take delight in the recent discovery of a computer program that was designed to perform this exact task more than fifty years ago. Christopher Strachey, one of the scientists working on the world’s first computer, the ‘Baby’, developed here at the University of Manchester, wrote the program in 1952 to test the capabilities of the computer. By trawling through thousands of amorous verbs and nouns entered into the program, the computer was able to generate vast quantities of romantic verse, offering such touching lines as ‘my ardent ambition winningly pines for your wistful appetite’.  

A recreation of the program has been developed by David Ward, the German computer ‘archaeologist’ who discovered Strachey’s original program. You can read more about Ward’s replica program and the history of the love poetry generator at www.telegraph.co.uk.

 

The world’s first stored-program computer, the ‘Baby’, was developed by Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams at the University of Manchester in 1948.

The video below shows an early BBC archive footege of the "Baby".