Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The love letter generator created by Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey

bigthink.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 13 posts

Re: The love letter generator created by Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey

#2

Post by terminalcommand »

This was a very cool read. Programmers were programmers even back in the day of Mark I.

It is cool to see that they dabbled in natural language processing back then. This is years before Eliza and they were working on generating English prose based on English grammar. Very impressive!

The music generation program they wrote is equally impressive. The recording that was playing shows that they were adept enough to time events in the computer so good that they could playback songs. This was back in the early 1950s.

Re: The love letter generator created by Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey

#7

Post by thaliaarchi »

terminalcommand wrote: post #2

This was a very cool read. Programmers were programmers even back in the day of Mark I. It is cool to see that they dabbled in natural language processing back then. This is years before Eliza and they were working on generating English prose based on English grammar. Very impressive! The music generation program they wrote is equally impressive. The recording that was playing shows that they were adept enough to tim…

This was also a year before Mad Libs was invented in 1953, using the same template-filling style.

Re: The love letter generator created by Alan Turing and Christopher Strachey

#10

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

tetris11 wrote: post #9
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #4

I couldn't help myself: http://beyondloom.com/decker/goofs/loveletter.html

This is beautiful. What is this?

Decker is a "multimedia sketchpad". It's a drawing program, a database, and a rapid prototyping environment. A "deck" can be exported as a self-contained, self-executing .html file (as seen above), and there's also a non-browser-based native application. It uses a functional scripting language named Lil which incorporates ideas from the APL family. You can learn more and play with some additional examples here:

http://beyondloom.com/decker/

Post reply on HN