Week 3

The oulipo piece was interesting. I thought it was interesting that the machine took into account how fast a user typed their name as input for determining which poems to show them. The author talks about using location which seems like a fair idea but they say that the reader has to get their latitude and longitude from another site and then put it in; this seems cumbersome to me. The part of the choose-your-own-adventure where two choices lead to the same place is interesting. I agree with the author that understanding the structure of the story does not supersede actually reading it. I agree that S+7 is cool because the output is so recognizable. The grammar piece was pretty straightforward because I have heard of context-free grammars before. I have heard that the ‘schm-’ phrases in English (e.g. ‘nilsson schmilsson’) are one of the things in particular that make English not context-free and I am interested in what other things prevent English from being context-free. The ‘Bot or Not’ game really stumped me. I played it at least three times and I lost every time, which is significantly worse than guessing. It is quite disconcerting that the game is so hard. It makes me wonder just how far robots can go in the poetry world.