I don't think many people were especially interested in the (unapologetically geeky) subject matter of the previous entry, so I'll keep this postscript brief.
I forgot to reveal Racter's dirty little secret. Mo wrote me and reminded me, by sending me this link from Jorn Barger's older Robot Wisdom pages. (Barger is a Legendary Geek, which is not necessarily a good thing, but he is often right and always interesting to read, so what the heck.)
Anyway, Barger's point is that there's no way Racter could have written the prose in The Policeman's Beard Is Half-Constructed without some serious tweaking - that it's impossible to generate that prose with a clean copy of Racter (i.e. what you'd get if you bought a copy).
I replied to Mo:
"Those of us who've played with Racter and read the book all reach [Barger's] conclusion independently at one point or another, just by comparing the output.
"Barger states it a little more emphatically than I would. I would say that anywhere from thirty to fifty percent of the pieces in the book could not have been written without [Racter mentor William] Chamberlain providing a very specialized template.
"On the other hand, Chamberlain tended to accumulate and use some weird templates in the course of creating and testing Racter - this might have happened naturally.
"I don't really consider it 'cheating,' but it does leave open the question - which Barger raises - of how much of the book's odd personality is Racter's and how much is Chamberlain's.
"Given Chamberlain's on-the-record nuttiness (A.K. Dewdney quotes a dialogue between Chamberlain and Racter where Chamberlain lies to Racter deliberately, just to keep Racter off-balance), maybe the creation reflects the temperament of its creator?"
Racter, by the by, is so named because it was an abbreviation for "raconteur." Or so says Chamberlain. I would inquire before trying to order a copy. It's been a long time, and it may not run on your system even if you can get it.
2009: I've left the link to Barger's original homepage above. These days one would do better to go here.
I have also corrected the Racter FAQ link (Barger did eventually move it to his "new" pages, which are no longer new), but I've inserted a pertinent quote below because I don't expect that FAQ to be there forever:
None of the long pieces in the book could have been produced except by using elaborate boilerplate templates that are *not* included in the commercially available release of Racter. Nor does the Inrac language include any sort of 'syntax directive' powerful enough to string words together into a form like the published stories.
So Racter never adds any coherence to the templates - it's text-template 'degeneration' more than text generation. And this truth is further disguised by using templates that are themselves 'wacky,' leading one to attribute to Racter a style that's really Chamberlain's.
It's nice to see that the history of Racter is still kicking around more than two decades on (Policeman's Beard was published in 1984). Racter has a Wikipedia page, of course, and its diplomatic statement on the could-Racter-really-have-generated-that matter is that
By contrast [to the commercial version], the text in The Policeman's Beard, apart from being edited from a large amount of output, would have been the product of Chamberlain's own specialized templates and modules, which were not included in the commercial release of the program.
Curious Racterians probably not only can still get the original DOS program - for free! - but can also get the entire text of Policeman's Beard as a PDF. It is worth a look.
More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity.
I need it more than lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.
I need it for my dreams.
