An edited version of this story has been published on tedium. This is an expanded version of the original draft.
AI is in the news a lot these days, and journalists, being writers, tend to be especially interested in computers that can write. Between OpenAI’s GPT-2 (the text-generating ‘transformer’ whose creators are releasing it a chunk at a time out of fear that it could be used for evil), Botnik Studios (the comedy collective that inspired the “we forced a bot to watch 100 hours of seinfeld” meme), and National Novel Generation Month (henceforth NaNoGenMo — a yearly challenge to write a program that writes a novel during the month of November), when it comes to writing machines, there’s a lot to write about. But if you only read about writing machines in the news, you might not realize that the current batch is at the tail end of a tradition that is very old.
A TIMELINE OF PROCEDURAL TEXT GENERATION
1230 BC: The creation of the earliest known oracle bones.
9th century BC: The creation of the I Ching, an extremely influential text for bibliomancy.
1305: The publication of the first edition of Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna, whose later editions introduced combinatorics.
1781: Court de Geblin, in his…
