I’m going out tonight and won’t have time to finish writing a poem for NaPoWriMo, so here are the haiku that Haiku Detector detected in the next three topics of New Scientist’s special issue with the ‘big questions’. I posted the unintentional haiku on reality, existence, and God last week. This seemed like a good place to find interesting unintentional haiku, so I ran Haiku Detector over the first three sections. Perhaps I’ll do the rest on later Saturdays, to give myself a weekly break during poetry writing month.
There’s only one unintentional haiku on the subject of consciousness, but it’s a good one:
You may think you know
the reasons, but they could be
a work of fiction.
Two about life:
These discoveries are
bringing an old paradox
back into focus.
There is a simple
way to get huge amounts of
energy this way.
One of these days I’ll add in some linguistics-based heuristics or a learning algorithm to rank the haiku; haiku lines ending in prepositions are often not as good, for example, and splitting the adjective from the following noun is a little weird too.
The section on time has the most and best haiku. This pleases me, because the largest text I tested Haiku Detector on when I first wrote it was the forum thread about the xkcd Time comic. There were a lot of haiku in there, and pointing them out encouraged people to write more.
So clocks tell us that
time is inextricably
linked somehow to change.
Now, more than ever,
we have to face up to our
ignorance of time.
If time’s arrow is
not in the laws of physics,
where does it come from?
Why do human brains
only remember the past
and not the future?
WE ALL, regardless
of our cultural background,
experience time.
Traditionally they
have lived by small-scale farming,
hunting and fishing.
Nonetheless, we could
do some interesting things with
our own time machine.
On the subject of time, I’d better hurry up and go out. Tune in next week for New Scientist’s unintentional haiku on the self, sleep, and death.
Creative Output 