| The breeze moved calmly across the meadows. Across the fields drifted the sky and then the clouds which soon drifted all afternoon floated by. Old Grey Owl who flew among the treetops happily flew off and off quickly ran Squirrel. She sniffed at an old oak tree but into the home gaily hurried Little Grey Rabbit who ate happily two buns. Hare quickly hurried over the woods and fields but Little Grey Rabbit ran about the garden. Down the path to the woods scampered Squirrel who then ran down the path to the woods. |
Little Grey Rabbit stories are discussed in the Catalogue of Cybernetic Serendipity, ICA Gallery, 1968.
They are (very) short stories written by a computer program. The Little Grey Rabbit stories are an interesting early example
of computer generated fiction. They are now almost entirely forgotten. The stories were the work of Professor Eric Mendoza
and date from the early 1960's.
The stories seem never to have been published. All that may remain of them are the examples given in the catalogue
and the description of aspects of their programming. Only two outputs are reproduced. This is one example:
'The sun shone over the woods.
Across the fields softly drifted
the breeze while then the clouds which
calmly floated all afternoon moved
across the fields.
Squirrel who scampered through the
trees quickly ran off and off noisily
ran Little Grey Rabbit. She sniffed at
the house but out of the door noisily hurried
Hare who peered at slowly the flowers.
Squirrel quickly scampered over the woods
and fields but Old Grey Owl flew over
the woods and fields.Down the path to
the woods ran Little Grey Rabbit
who then sniffed at a stawberry pie.'
My program emulates the construction of these paragraphs.
Professor Mendoza recounts his program writing:
'...very boring stories that did not even satisfy my youngest children...
I tried these stories on my very small children but after some minutes they grew very irritable,
because nothing actually happened. This shows that even small children of three can measure entropy'
It is the poetry of this entropic tedium that I hope is preserved in my program.
Repetitions and oddities seem to be inherent in the program logic.
Professor Mendoza's original program for the Little Grey Rabbit stories seems also to be missing.
I have replicated its functioning using Perl. Professor Mendoza presents
some of the structure of his program in the form of probability matrices. I have
created a version of these matrices in my program.
The code is here
A variant version ('Nocturne') is here.
There is a paper about my research into Mendoza's work here: Resuscitating a Dead Rabbit
Wayne Clements. July 2020
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