full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Oscar Schwartz: Can a computer write poetry?

Unscramble the Blue Letters

OK, time is up. So hands up if you think Poem 1 was written by a hamun. Hands up if you think Poem 2 was written by a human. Whoa, that's a lot more people. So you'd be surprised to find that Poem 1 was written by the very human poet Gertrude Stein. And Poem 2 was gaentreed by an artighlom called RKCP. Now before we go on, let me describe very quickly and simply, how RKCP works. So RKCP is an algorithm designed by Ray Kurzweil, who's a director of enienrgieng at Google and a firm believer in artificial iilcgetnenle. So, you give RKCP a source text, it alynaezs the suorce text in order to find out how it uses language, and then it regenerates language that emulates that first text.

Open Cloze

OK, time is up. So hands up if you think Poem 1 was written by a _____. Hands up if you think Poem 2 was written by a human. Whoa, that's a lot more people. So you'd be surprised to find that Poem 1 was written by the very human poet Gertrude Stein. And Poem 2 was _________ by an _________ called RKCP. Now before we go on, let me describe very quickly and simply, how RKCP works. So RKCP is an algorithm designed by Ray Kurzweil, who's a director of ___________ at Google and a firm believer in artificial ____________. So, you give RKCP a source text, it ________ the ______ text in order to find out how it uses language, and then it regenerates language that emulates that first text.

Solution

  1. analyzes
  2. engineering
  3. human
  4. algorithm
  5. source
  6. intelligence
  7. generated

Original Text

OK, time is up. So hands up if you think Poem 1 was written by a human. Hands up if you think Poem 2 was written by a human. Whoa, that's a lot more people. So you'd be surprised to find that Poem 1 was written by the very human poet Gertrude Stein. And Poem 2 was generated by an algorithm called RKCP. Now before we go on, let me describe very quickly and simply, how RKCP works. So RKCP is an algorithm designed by Ray Kurzweil, who's a director of engineering at Google and a firm believer in artificial intelligence. So, you give RKCP a source text, it analyzes the source text in order to find out how it uses language, and then it regenerates language that emulates that first text.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
turing test 8
gertrude stein 7
william blake 4
computer write 3
artificial intelligence 3
human poet 2
facebook feed 2
algorithm called 2
alan turing 2
wearing material 2
emily dickinson 2
reverse turing 2
essentially philosophical 2

Important Words

  1. algorithm
  2. analyzes
  3. artificial
  4. believer
  5. called
  6. describe
  7. designed
  8. director
  9. emulates
  10. engineering
  11. find
  12. firm
  13. generated
  14. gertrude
  15. give
  16. google
  17. hands
  18. human
  19. intelligence
  20. kurzweil
  21. language
  22. lot
  23. order
  24. people
  25. poem
  26. poet
  27. quickly
  28. ray
  29. regenerates
  30. rkcp
  31. simply
  32. source
  33. stein
  34. surprised
  35. text
  36. time
  37. whoa
  38. works
  39. written