Racter: An Early Foray into Algorithmic Prose and Artificial Insanity (1984)

Racter, an artificial intelligence program that emerged in the mid-1980s, stands as a peculiar artifact in the nascent history of computational creativity. Its primary, if somewhat audacious, purpose was to generate English language prose with an apparent degree of randomness. This digital raconteur first saw the light of day, or rather, the glow of cathode-ray tubes, when it was published by Mindscape in 1984. Initially made available for IBM PC compatibles, its influence, or perhaps its novelty, soon spread to other platforms, including the Apple II, Mac, and [Amiga). It’s worth noting, however, that the truly ambitious iteration of Racter – the one responsible for the surprisingly coherent, if utterly bizarre, text of the published book The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed – was a distinct, expanded version of the software, never fully released to the general public by Mindscape. One might say the public got the watered-down, easily digestible version, while the real intellectual oddity remained behind the velvet ropes.

History

More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity. I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber. I need it for my dreams.

— Racter, The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed

This quote, delivered with an almost poignant, if entirely simulated, yearning, offers a glimpse into the strangely compelling output attributed to Racter. The name "Racter" itself is a truncation of "raconteur," a storyteller, which, given the program's ultimate capabilities, might be seen as either an ironic jest or an aspirational title. The program was the brainchild of William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter, two individuals who dared to explore the boundaries of machine-generated narrative.

Racter's genesis can be traced back to a short story titled "Soft Ions," which made its debut in the October 1981 issue of the venerable Omni (magazine). What truly sets this origin story apart is the rather unconventional timeline: the publication's editors, with a foresight bordering on recklessness, acquired the rights to the story in January 1980, a full year before the story had even been written. One has to admire the sheer audacity. In exchange for these pre-emptive rights, the editors extended financial support to Chamberlain and Etter, enabling the duo to further refine Racter. This early investment perhaps suggests a genuine belief in the program's potential, or perhaps just a willingness to gamble on an intriguing curiosity.

By 1983, Racter had produced its magnum opus, a book that would etch its name, however briefly, into the annals of computational literature: The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed (ISBN 0-446-38051-2). This collection of prose, attributed solely to the machine, was a testament to the program's ability to weave together grammatically correct, if often nonsensical, narratives.

The technical journey of Racter itself is as convoluted as some of its generated sentences. The program was originally conceived and written for an OSI system, a platform notorious for its rather restrictive file naming conventions, supporting names of merely six characters at most. This limitation is what necessitated the shortening of "raconteur" to "Racter." Subsequently, the program underwent an adaptation to run on a CP/M machine. In this iteration, it was meticulously crafted in "compiled ASIC on a Z80 microcomputer equipped with a modest 64K of RAM." This specific version, the one purportedly responsible for authoring the peculiar prose of The Policeman's Beard, was, crucially, never made available to the general public. The sophisticated capabilities claimed for this particular iteration of the program were, upon closer scrutiny, likely somewhat exaggerated, a fact that became evident through a detailed investigation into the underlying template system of text generation. It seems the wizard behind the curtain had a few more tricks up his sleeve than the audience was privy to.

In 1984, the general computing public was introduced to an interactive version of Racter, released by Mindscape and developed by Inrac Corporation. This version was initially designed for IBM PC compatibles and subsequently ported to the Apple II, Mac, and Amiga platforms. The Racter that consumers could purchase bore a closer resemblance to a rudimentary chatterbot than the literary prodigy described in the book's promotional material. Indeed, the BASIC program released by Mindscape was demonstrably less sophisticated than anything capable of generating the comparatively intricate and often surreal prose found in The Policeman's Beard.

The commercial iteration of Racter could be aptly compared to a computerized rendition of Mad Libs, that familiar game where participants insert various parts of speech into a pre-written story template to produce a surrealistic and often humorous tale. This consumer-grade program made a valiant, if ultimately limited, attempt to parse user text inputs. It would identify significant nouns and verbs, which it would then cleverly regurgitate to construct "conversations." This was achieved by plugging the user's input into pre-defined phrase templates, combining these with modules capable of conjugating English verbs. It was, in essence, a sophisticated pattern-matching and substitution engine, rather than a genuine creative entity.

The stark contrast between the commercial program and the book's content is critical. The text comprising The Policeman's Beard, beyond undergoing a selective editing process from a vast quantity of raw output, was the direct result of Chamberlain's own specialized templates and bespoke linguistic modules. These advanced components, which imbued the book's prose with its unique character, were conspicuously absent from the commercial release of the program. It's almost as if the public was given a toy car, while the creators kept the actual race engine for themselves.

Reception

The initial reception to Racter's capabilities, particularly in its early "Soft Ions" phase, was a curious mix of skepticism and cautious optimism. The Boston Phoenix famously characterized the story "Soft Ions" as "schematic nonsense." A rather blunt assessment, yet they conceded that "the scheme is obvious enough and the nonsense accessible enough to an attentive reader that one can almost believe Chamberlain when he predicts that before long Racter will be ready to write for the pulp-reading public." High praise, considering the bar for "pulp-reading public" is usually somewhere around "comprehensible."

Upon the release of The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed, the critical response continued to be a blend of fascination and bemusement. PC Magazine, for instance, found some of the book's scenes "surprising for their frankness" and, rather generously, "reflective." The publication ultimately concluded that the book was "whimsical and wise and sometimes fun." One wonders what constitutes "wisdom" when delivered by an algorithm, but perhaps the mere novelty was enough to elicit such descriptors. Computer Gaming World, in its assessment of the commercial Racter program, described it as "a diversion into another dimension that might best be seen before paying the price of a ticket. (Try before you buy!)" – a sensible recommendation for a program that promised existential musings but often delivered glorified Mad Libs.

A 1985 review published in The New York Times offered one of the more memorable and prescient observations, noting that, "As computers move ever closer to artificial intelligence, Racter is on the edge of artificial insanity." This statement, delivered with a certain gravitas, encapsulates the program's peculiar charm: its ability to generate sentences that were indeed "always-changing," "grammatically correct," often "funny," and, for a machine, occasionally "profound." The article further enriched its analysis by including illustrative examples of interaction with Racter, predominantly showcasing the program's tendency to pose questions to the user, a clever mechanism to prompt further engagement and provide new linguistic fodder for its templates.

Reviews

• Jeux & Stratégie [fr] #47 [10]

See also

Racter, while an early and somewhat quirky example, was not alone in the burgeoning field of computational creativity and conversational artificial intelligence. Its contemporaries and successors continued to explore the boundaries of what machines could "understand" and "generate."

• David Cope: A notable figure in algorithmic music composition, Cope's work with programs like EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) explored the generation of new musical pieces in the style of various classical composers. His efforts ran parallel to Racter's in demonstrating machine capacity for creative output, albeit in a different medium.
• ELIZA: Developed by Joseph Weizenbaum in the mid-1960s, ELIZA was one of the earliest conversational programs, often mimicking a Rogerian psychotherapist. While far simpler than Racter in its linguistic generation, ELIZA famously demonstrated how easily humans could project intelligence and empathy onto a rule-based system, a phenomenon Racter also inadvertently tapped into.
• MegaHAL: A later example of a conversational AI, MegaHAL employed statistical methods and neural networks to generate human-like text. It represents a significant evolution from Racter's template-based approach, showcasing the progression towards more complex and fluid natural language generation.