created 2025-05-30, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025paperfragements
rel: Georges Perec’s Thinking Machines Oulipo
P.A.L.F. – production automatique de littérature française, a literary project of Georges Perec and Marcel Benabou, worked on between 1966 to 1973.
Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, 1961) and his branching “Un conte à votre façon” (“Story of Your Own,” 1973) resemble plans for combinatorial machines.
Oulipo have been inactive in computational creativity. Oulipo originally privileged mathematics. Because of the graphical complexities of mathematical notation, they might spend less time at the computer. Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem only used a computer to write his results.
This is changing however, as computers are use directly to systematically verify proofs.
One proposed reason is that Oulipo’s activity is essential craftlike, and craft and automation are at odds in key aspects.
P.A.L.F. was manual and time-consuming, not meant to be mechanizable. Human choice intervenes at two levels: adjustments to maintain coherence, and choosing between definitions.
The basic point of the exercise is to demonstrate that any two lexical items in French are linked by a chain of synonymic or homonymic substitutions passing via subsidiary meanings, and that by the same procedure any two strings of comparable length can be made to converge on a third.
The P.A.L.F. system produces literature not from raw materials but from fragments of finished works. This is part of the point: literature is made by transforming what has already been written; like language, it “goes round in circles and functions in a closed loop”