Love-Letters by Christopher Strachey

A landmark in the history of computer-generated text, Strachey’s love letter algorithm (or M.U.C.) created generative poems by combining words selected from a database via the random generator of the Ferranti Mark I.

It anticipates the combinatorial procedures the computer artists of the ’60s, among them Noll, Nake and Nees, would arrive at independently.

Besides its massive importance in the development of information theory and the computer art of the ’60s, Love-Letters remains pivotal to how we think about digital generative art today.

Sasha Stiles writes of this event’s importance:

“In collaboration with Alan Turing, programmer Christopher Strachey creates an automated love-letter generator for the Manchester Mark I computer [the Ferranti Mark 1] – the world’s first experiment in text-generating software.”

Listen to Peter Bauman’s interview with A. Michael Noll (transcript).