VOGONS, fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will recall, wrote poetry so bad it could kill. Now an experiment to create poems on the web looks likely to automate the awfulness of Vogon verse.
David Rea of Greenwich, Connecticut, has written a program that allows a poem to evolve, to see if people with diverse tastes in poetry can work together to create attractive verse. Rea’s program starts off with 1000 “poems”, each comprising four lines of five randomly chosen words. People visiting the website choose between two randomly selected verses from the population. The bad ones are…
