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Comment by gridspy | Hacker News Reader

I got 6/6

I didn't even read that far. It was obvious by here:

SONNET #2

    The dirty rusty wooden dresser drawer.
    A couple million people wearing drawers,
    Or looking through a lonely oven door,
    Flowers covered under marble floors.

This is exactly how a computer algorithm would conflate drawer with drawers. There is no obvious theme to this verse, no high level construct.

Every human poem in this example has a high level theme, which is non-obvious to a computer. None of the computer ones do.

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That's how I got 6/6 as well. It's less about the actual words and more about if the poem was actually talking about anything coherent.

All the computer poems were just rambling and rhyming and weren't really even trying to say anything. A lot of the time they phrased things VERY awkwardly too, to the point of being incomprehensible.

Sounds like rap music :)

Also interesting to compare with less thematically structured work. Probably not the greatest example but what comes to my mind is some of The Mars Volta's lyrics; a lot of it is pretty abstract and stream-of-consciousness and it's hard to really pinpoint a narrative as such, compared to the example poems which were pretty straightforward

    "Last night I heard lepers
    flinch like birth defects
    its musk was fecal in origin
    as the words dribbled off of its chin
    it said I'm lost
    I'm lost
    
    Now I'm lost
    
    Dolls wreck the minced meat of pupils
    cast in oblong arms length
    the hooks have been picking their scabs
    where wolves hide in the company of men
    it said I'm lost
    I'm lost"

Yep, the human poems would often refer back to an idea or word mentioned before. The computer poems read like something from a good markov generator.

Actually, you can kind of reverse engineer the algorithm behind Sonnet #2. It seems like they first pick a bunch of related words that rhyme (drawer, door, floors, apartment, wall) and then build up the line backwards. The problem is that even though the words are related, the actual lines don't form any single cohesive image.

>This is exactly how a computer algorithm would conflate drawer with drawers.

Because human poets never do wordplay like that?

Because when humans do, there is an obvious (sometimes less obvious, but present) reason to do so.

There is no such link made in this example between the usages.

You haven't read a lot of schoolkid poetry posted at public libraries, have you?

I'm not sure that the majority of that really qualifies as poetry, at least not in a man vs. machine context.

That's what I found. All the "human" ones were easy, but then you had to play "machine or awful poet?" on the rest.

I answered 'human' for drawer/drawers, because "surely an algorithm would be designed to avoid this kind of thing? surely it'd be better than that... must just be a bad poet"

Are you implying that awful poets are in fact not human?

I believe I could make a solid argument for that. :P

But no, it's just that all the bad poets in the original article were machines in the end.

I got this one wrong. I thought no way a computer would be so dumb to have drawer and then drawers in the next sentence and this was a trick question to get one to say machine. Guess I overestimated the algorithm !

Inability to differentiate homonyms is one of the current weaknesses of word embeddings, isn't it?

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