I’ve been sitting on some improvements to Haiku Detector for a while, and it’s about time I released the new version. I had been planning to put this version on the app store, but I’m waiting to hear back from somebody about an icon for it. So for now, you can download it without going through the store. It should work on Mac OS X 10.6 or later.
This version finds haiku made up of multiple sentences rather than only those made of 17-syllable sentences. I also fixed the bug which caused it to crash occasionally when dealing with very long texts. To celebrate, I’ll go through some of the same texts I did when I first released Haiku Detector, and see what new haiku are discovered. To start with, John Scalzi‘s Old Man’s War. This version of Haiku Detector finds 304 haiku in it. Sometimes, sentences can be included in more than one haiku:
“I’m sorry. My sense
of humor was surgically
removed as a child.”
“My sense of humor
was surgically removed as
a child.” “Oh,” I said.
“Oh,” I said. “That was
a joke,” she said, and stood up,
extending her hand.
Here are some of my favourites of the multi-sentence haiku:
She asked, still without
actually looking up
at me. “Pardon me?”
“Okay,” I said. “Mind
if I ask you a question?”
“I’m married,” she said.
“Well, she doesn’t have
to live with you, now does she.”
“How was the cookie?”
“Our friend Thomas would
make it to mile six before
his heart imploded.”
This one sounds like it could be a metaphysical statement about what consciousness is in general:
Your consciousness is
perceiving the small time lag
between there and here.
“I would not presume
to assume, Master Sergeant!”
‘Presume to assume’?
My wife’s out here, sure.
But she’s happy to live her
new life without me.
“Let me see.” Silence.
The familiar voice again.
“Get this log off him.”
“The question now is
what is really going on.”
“Any thoughts on it?”
I think this one is my favourite:
I can just be me.
But I think you could love me
if you wanted to.
I found a lot of new haiku in the CMS paper announcing the discovery of the Higgs boson, but they were all combinations of names from the stupendous author list. Since I included some from New Scientist last time, here are some from the issue of New Scientist that I am currently reading, a special issue on the human brain:
Imaging techniques
are allowing us to see
the brain in action.
The sound waves broke up
the synchronous firing,
ending the seizure.
Thought experiments
Sometimes an experiment
is impossible.
The ancient Greeks knew
about thought experiments
in mathematics.
These two go together:
Does that mean we should
revise our definition
of intelligence?
Until recently,
the same one had been used since
the 1950s.
I have many ideas for improving Haiku Detector, and I’d still like to see if I can detect the best-sounding haiku using linguistic tagging, but before that I’m thinking of rewriting the whole thing in Swift as a learning exercise. Since I don’t have a day job at the moment, I have a bit of free time if I strategically ignore sections of my to-do list. Actually, on that note, here are some particularly obvious haiku from the Mac OS X and iOS Human Interface guidelines:
At a minimum,
a menu displays a list
of menu items.
A picker displays
a set of values from which
a user picks one.
That will do for now. I hope you enjoy playing with the new version of Haiku Detector.
Creative Output 