NOTE
Algorithms providing anonymized romantic voice (choice from generated options.)
Darling Sweetheart
You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking.
Yours beautifully
M U C
Alongside Turing, Strachey worked on several experiments with Artificial Intelligence: a computer that could sing songs, one of the world’s first computer games, and an algorithm to write gender-neutral mash notes that screamed with longing.
On Mark1:
Strachey said, “I sat in front of this enormous machine with four or five rows of twenty switches and things, in a room that felt like the control room of a battleship.”
“To behave like a brain seems to involve free will,” Turing continues, “but the behavior of a digital computer, when it has been programmed, is completely determined.”re [Random] To solve this problem, he suggests a trick. The computer could use a roulette wheel feature to select variables randomly. Then, the computer would appear to make something original and new by adding in a touch of randomness.
Strachey used a random number generator programmed by Turing to write the Mark 1’s love letter generator. This program randomly selected words to fit into an already-made template; while this wasn’t exactly total free choice, the resulting letters were highly original.
Generate Salutation 1 and 2,
Do this 5 times:
Randomly generate one of the following templates:
1. “You are my” Adjective Noun
2. “My” Adjective(optional) Noun Adverb(optional)
Verb, Your Adjective(optional) Noun
Generate “Yours” Adverb, “MUC” (Strachey, “M.U.C Love
Letter Generator”)
If Turing and Strachey couldn’t be open about their desires, they’d program a computer that could do it for them.
Strachey wrote about his interest in how “a rather simple trick” can produce an illusion that the computer is thinking, and that “these tricks can lead to quite unexpected and interesting results”.
Jacob Gaboury argues that the love letter generator exposes the impersonality of love, showing that “the false veneer lying at the heart of that most deeply human emotion is pure camp: an exultant love of the artificial”.