Here’s a modified version of some earlier code I write, this time pared down to generate some semiotic square templates as opposed to analogic square templates. I don’t find them anywhere as amusing, but I guess it has some worth of its own anyway…
Following a brief elopement with Levi-Strauss earlier this year, I found myself one evening tinkering with a small program to generate semiotic/analogic squares.
Given two pairs of ‘opposites’ (a,b) and (c,d), one can construct a square by juxtaposing different elements from each pair.
For instance, we might get this
| body bad |
body good |
|---|---|
| mind bad |
mind good |
While reading this book, I came across a similar interpretation of Levi-Strauss’s canonical formula (more about which I will write in a future post) the form of which I’m sure you’ll be able to see by looking at a single example for a moment:
| technology ends mental |
-> | technology means mental |
|---|---|---|
| nature ends mental |
nature means physical |
This interpretation is given by Racine, and is not explicit in Levi-Strauss’s original work. I don’t find it especially rich either as interpretations go, but it was interesting to look at the results it could produce.
The resulting program may be seen here.
(n.b. this articles is mainly, humourous, but some pretty bizzare/interesting things come out of it.)
Ok, if you don’t know…duality is a feature of some areas of maths where given a proof you can swap some terms and get the dual of it’s proof. For example, in projective geometry, you can switch the words “point” and “line”, and “meet” and “join” (and some others, but I’m only giving a simple example). So, given the statemenn “two points join to form a line”, you can get “two lines meet to form a point”. See? it works?
My main object here will be to construct a program that will, given a basic erotic story, reverse the sexes of the participants (and of course it will fail miserably in the process).
So, basically all i have to do is list all the different couples of male/female words. I’m going to avoid objective pronouns because though “his” matches with “her”, so does “him”…so it would work fine from male to female but not vice-versa (because she can have two meanings depending on context) Likewise, her shouldn’t be used as a objective pronoun. This can be overcome with a grammatical parser … but I don’t have time to implement such a program at the moment.
So here’s some things from the list, just to give you a rough idea.
he|she
his|her
penis|vagina
woman|man
womanly|manly
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I’m quite proud of it *proud*, despite the grammatical incompatibilities (which could be fixed, but I don’t really want to put that much time into it).
I->lie->alien->salient
(In a style suggested me by Nasa).
I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation, bitch.