On Wed. January 11th I released hackerhaiku.com
- a generative poetry project that I had been working on for three months. The project very quickly and unexpectadly went viral. Within several hours, it hit the top 10 list on the front page of OpenSea.
While the website provides a pretty good description of the project, I'd like to share some additional notes on the creation and release of Hacker Haiku
.
The algorithm to generate the haikus is written in JavaScipt. The first iteration of the algorithm was woven into a chunk of boilerplate p5js code as my original ambition was to build some eye candy on top of the text and release the work on a platform like fxhash or Art Blocks.
The algorithm starts by defining a "library" of keywords, their syllable counts, and suffixes that can be appended to each word in order to transform it into a diffrent tense, pluralize it, or conjugate it. It looks like this, but includes just under 150 unique words:
library = [