The History of Text Generation

Did people procedurally generate text before computers? Yes! It turns out that there were a lot of different ways people have invented over the past thousand years, including the volvelle and the zairja. Find out more in this really awesome write up of pre-twentieth century text generation by Holly Gramazio of Math Marcault.

There were fortune-telling devices, poem generators, and spinning wheels that spelled out words.

There’s a fascinating aside about how text generation is easier in Semitic languages, because they are conventionally written without vowels, making it easier to find valid combinations of constants. 

(English, I would venture to say, is a fairly terrible language for text generation, given its many irregularities.)

There’s even a discussion about this poem generator, which includes a link to an online implementation of it. If you wanted to write experimental generated poetry in the 1600s, you’d have company.

The article also includes a nice long bibliography, if you want to read about any of this in much more depth.

http://mathesonmarcault.com/index.php/2015/12/15/randomly-generated-title-goes-here/