Randomness

Even before the SAGA II playlets, there were other literary experiments with randomness and computers. Noah Wardrip-Fruin identifies the British computer scientist Christopher Strachey as the creator of the first work of electronic literature, a series of "love letters" generated by the Ferranti Mark I computer at Manchester University in 1952 (Wardrip-Fruin 2005). Affectionately known as M.U.C., the Manchester University Computer could produce the evocative love letters at a pace of one per minute for hours on end without duplicating any love letter. The "trick," as Strachey put it, was the two model sentences (e.g. My ''adjective'' ''noun'' ''adverb'' ''verb'' your ''adjective'' ''noun'') in which the nouns, adjectives, and adverbs were randomly selected from a list of words Strachey had culled from Roget's Thesaurus. Adverbs and adjectives randomly dropped out of the sentence as well, and the computer randomly alternated the two sentences. On the whole, Strachey is dismissive of his foray into the literary use of computers, using the example of the love letters simply to illustrate his point that simple rules can generate diverse and unexpected results (Strachey 1954). Nonetheless, a decade before Raymond Queneau's ''One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems,'' Strachey had unwittingly laid the foundation for the combinatory method of composition, a use of randomness that would grow more central to literature and the arts in the following decades.