Poetry for Hackers: A crab canon for Douglas Hofstadter | Hacker News Reader

Poetry for Hackers: A crab canon for Douglas Hofstadter

3quarksdaily.com

82 pointspatrickas12 comments

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Neat idea. My try:

Unbelievable!

He found

on the tired sofa an image

with his ex girlfriend,

a strange and worn-out pillow,

and he cried; he longed for

a strange and worn-out pillow

with his ex girlfriend

on the tired sofa; an image

he found

unbelievable.

If you liked that, play the game Braid (http://braid-game.com). I won't give any spoilers, but it's a $9.95 purchase so just go out and buy it already. :)

That's strange but I never made the connection until you mentioned it! Braid is one of my all time favorite games too!

Edit: And as of yesterday it is available in the Ubuntu software center.

Thanks a lot for the heads up on Braid being available through Ubuntu software center, I just bought and installed it now - lovely game.

Lovely poem as well. I really enjoyed "I Am a Strange Loop", guess I should get around to reading GEB as well.

A beautiful poem. Also, GEB is a great book.

The spanish translation of that chapter of GEB was not enjoyable, sadly enough.

Strange, I came here to say the italian version was pretty good :)

This may be a function of the author being a(n impressively) fluent speaker of the language, though on the other hand the translation of Carrol's Jabberwocky poem in the book is terrible.

I believe he was using other people's translations. (At least, in the English version, he compared it to other's French and German translations.)

That was a very nice poem, but these kinds of things are actually not all that hard, if you are willing to play with them long enough. I once wrote a palindrome that was a rhymed quatrain-- it took about a week of fiddling, if I recall correctly.

[Insert any creative work or admirable skill here] is actually not all that hard, if you are willing to play with it long enough.

Sure, but some are harder than others.

My point is that composing something like this is more akin to solving a crossword puzzle than to composing a symphony.

As I said, a week of fiddling will get you a (letter-by-letter) palindrome of four lines, at least in my experience.

In terms of satisfying the technical demands of the form, yes. But creating a work with evocative punch like this poem has is more akin to composing a symphony.

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