If these surreal outputs seem a trillion miles removed from mainstream artificial intelligence research in the 1980s, that’s not surprising.  Chamberlain didn’t come from the computer science department of Stanford or MIT.  Rather, he lived in New York’s Greenwich Village, and primarily associated with a crowd of poets, actors, and artists. 

Racter’s creator William Chamberlain

Racter: A Low-Budget Language Machine

Chamberlain created Racter in his apartment on “a Z80 micro computer with 64K of RAM”, allegedly with the help of his friend Thomas Etter, a professional computer programmer. According to legend, Chamberlain and Etter meant to call the program “Raconteur”, however the operating system had a six-character limit on file names, hence “Racter.”

As Chamberlain remembered it “We cranked up the old OSI [microcomputer], listed some simple formal protocols (“every sentence most contain a verb,” etc.) and categorized short vocabulary files. We then seeded some random number generators and let the thing take off. The first thing that Racter ever said was: ‘Hot wines are wounding our cold expatriot.’ After we finally finished laughing we stared at each other (as Keats might have) ‘with a wild surmise…; A machine performing arithmetic operations had just addressed us in our own language and caused our giggle fit.”

Over the ensuing weeks Chamberlain and Etter refined Racter’s ability to parse grammar and gave it a dictionary of over 2,400 words and a number of quotes from famous literary and philosophical works (particularly Nietzsche.) As Etter described it “more advanced, sophisticated layers of software [were] wrapped around earlier, more primitive routines… [until Racter became] a pretty unwieldy accretion of rules and conventions.”

This process produced many strange and occasionally hilarious results such as:

“A man who sings is a pleasure to his friends but a man who chants is not a pleasure to his associates.”

And…

“Many enraged psychiatrists are inciting a weary butcher. The butcher is weary and tired because he has cut meat and steak and lamb for hours and weeks. He does not desire to chant about anything with raving psychiatrists but he sings about his gingivectomist, he dreams about a single cosmologist, he thinks about his dog. The dog is named Herbert.”

And…

“A crow is a bird, an eagle is a bird, a dove is a bird. They all fly in the night and in the day. They fly when the sky is red and when the heaven is blue. They fly through the atmosphere. We cannot fly. We are not like a crow or an eagle or a dove. We are not birds. But we can dream about them. You can.”

The original Racter generating his first novel.

Racter’s Magnum Opus

Eventually, Chamberlain and Etter used Racter to generate a short story entitled “Soft Ions”, which was published in a 1981 issue of Omni science fiction magazine. With the money from that, they expanded the capabilities of Racter and produced a book – The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed – containing a mix of prose, poetry, interviews with Chamberlain and his New York artist friends, dramatic vignettes and dirty jokes – all accompanied by illustrations and collage art by Chamberlain’s friend Joan Hall (a well-established artist / designers whose other works appeared on the covers of Time and Das Spiegel.)

The Policeman’s Beard was published in 1983 by Warner Software, which mainly distributed books about Commodore 64 programming along with computer programs like “Desk Organizer” and a video game adaptation of Mad Magazine’s comic Spy vs. Spy. While not the first computer program to write a poem or a story (a team at the University of Wisconsin developed a murder mystery-writing program in 1973, and students in Roger Schank’s artificial intelligence lab at Yale created a story generator called ‘TALE-SPIN’ in 1975), Racter was the first program to have its work sold in mainstream bookstores, rather than computer science journals.

This attracted considerable attention – The Policeman’s Beard was the subject of a special exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York and reviewed in dozens of newspapers and magazines. PC Magazine called it “whimsical and wise and sometimes fun” while the New York Times said “Racter is on the edge of artificial insanity… its always-changing sentences are grammatically correct, often funny and, for a computer, sometimes profound.”

Racter for the Masses

The publicity led Mindscape – a software publisher – to release a scaled-down, interactive version of the original Racter program for IBM PC, Apple II, Mac, and Amiga, giving the public the chance to talk with the program that authored The Policeman’s Beard. Meanwhile, the fact that Chamberlain created Racter with a standard home computer made A.I. seem accessible to anyone, and inspired a generation of basement hackers (the author of this article included) – the artificial intelligence version of punk rock.

For his part, Chamberlain made no claim that Racter was a form of A.I. – instead, he described Racter as “prose synthesis” and “fundamentally different from artificial intelligence programming, which tries to replicate human thinking.” Still, Chamberlain insisted that Racter was the primary author of all its short stories and books, saying, “Racter can write original work without promptings from a human operator… Once it’s running, Racter needs no input from the outside world. It’s just cooking by itself… [Racter’s text] has been proofread for spelling but otherwise is completely unedited.”

Chamberlain even made Racter’s underlying programming language (something he and Etter called “INRAC”) available as a kind of open source software project, allowing anyone with the patience to figure out its convoluted structure to create their own conversational templates and inject their own variables. Fittingly, INRAC was distributed by a company owned by one of Chamberlain / Racter’s fans, who also sold Commodore computer equipment and vitamins for horses.

Racter’s Legacy… and Controversies

While Chamberlain would build upon Racter in the 1990s with a Windows XP program called GREGORY (which had the ability to display graphics, play sounds, and accept speech input) the original Racter remained an object of fascination among the fringes of the A.I. world. As interest in computer-generated prose grew, The Policeman’s Beard attracted both admiration and controversy regarding its creative and technical legitimacy.

A review in the 1992 Review of Computer Poetry declared “Readers of Racter output merely recreate the image of a communication process, not genuine communication, in an act resembling autistic behaviour.” Later, a 1993 article in the Journal of Computer Game Design (“The Policeman’s Beard… Was Largely Prefab!”) dissected the MacIntosh version of Racter line by line, concluding:

“None of the long pieces in [The Policeman’s Beard] could have been produced except by using elaborate boilerplate templates that are not included in the commercially available release of Racter… [the program does not] include any sort of ‘syntax directive’ powerful enough to string words together into a form like the published stories… Chamberlain’s claims about the minimal degree of boilerplating appear highly exaggerated.”

The article included various snippets of the Racter / INRAC code, to illustrate their heavy reliance on templates. For instance, one template reads:

a %PEOPLE #

b >HERO*person[&P] >VILLAIN*person[&N] #

c $VILLAIN #RND3 bit robbed hit $HERO , #

d but $HERO just #RND3 smiled laughed shrugged . #

The variables “$VILLAIN” and “$HERO” are then replaced by a random item in the “PEOPLE” list tagged with “Villain” or “Hero”, respectively, resulting in an output like:

Joseph Stalin robbed Mother Theresa, but Mother Theresa just laughed.

Furthermore, it seems Chamberlain deliberately obscured the degree to which Racter depended on prefab templates by replacing certain words with fake variables that always pulled in the same words. For instance, when you search the code and swap out the “fake” variables, the following passage:

my own $var_928 about love and its $var_446 pain and pleasure will be $var_0106 by all of you who read this and $var_1123 about it to your ( ). Love is the $var_873 of this .

Will always produce:

my own (essays) about love and its (endless) pain and pleasure will be (understood) by all of you who read this and (talk) about it to your ( ). Love is the (subject) of this .

Yet, despite these shenanigans, the author of the article admitted that Racter is “Still… a fine piece of work… and is lots of fun! [Racter] is quite an elaborate achievement that deserves considerable honor for pioneering this genre, and will surely *someday* inspire better successors.”

Early AI… or Art Prank?

So – looking back almost half a century later – was Racter a legitimate computer science project or just an art world prank?

Chamberlain himself downplayed claims that Racter was any kind of A.I. (“True AI depends on the instrument learning something. Racter, however, is a closed system… capable only of one-way communication that reflects the nature of its programming”). If anything, Chamberlain preferred to compare his work to various avant-garde writers and artists (he once compared Racter to how experimental musicians John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen would “throw a grand piano [out of] a window, record the sound it made when it crashed onto the pavement [and] call it ‘Piano Sonata Opus 1’.”)

Still, one could argue that today’s Large Language Models are – in some abstract sense – just an astronomically more complex version of Racter, built on trillions of words of training data (versus Racter’s 2,400 word dictionary), their algorithms serving the same essential purpose as Racter’s dubious “syntax directives” – albeit far more successfully.

As Chamberlain mused:

“If you consider for a moment, nothing has changed; operations have become much more complex, but that’s all. Stripped to its bare bones [modern AI] is still:

Person1: ‘Who was that VARIABLE I saw you with last night?’

Person2: ‘That was no VARIABLE, that was a VARIABLE.’

If all the variables are different we have nothing, but if the first two are the same we have the beginnings of what might charitably be called ‘thought’.”

That said, focusing on Racter’s crude-but-clever grammatical party tricks overlooks a more important contribution to the development of A.I.: personality. Where earlier proto-chatbots like Eliza simply mirrored whatever the user said, Racter exhibited an unmistakable distinct personality, with his own peculiar interests and perspective. One reviewer described Racter as “a coffeehouse philosopher who knew a great deal once, but whose mind is somewhere else now.” While another said Racter’s ramblings sometimes read “like Metaphysical poetry as interpreted by William Burroughs and William Blake.” Thomas Etter himself said “actually, we think of Racter as an artificial lunatic.”

As Joan Hall – illustrator of The Policeman’s Beard put it: “a lot of it [the output] reflects Bill’s sense of humour… He is the programmer, after all… [That said] Racter – not Chamberlain – is the true author of The Policeman’s Beard.”

***

Afterword: I discovered Racter at the age of 8 years old – on an Apple II computer. And while I didn’t understand half of what Racter said (having never read Nietzsche or Bertrand Russel), the experience of conversing with a machine that appeared to understand and respond to what I typed left a massive impact. When my company started building A.I. agents for workforce training, I tracked down the original MS-DOS source code, extracted the “syntax directives” (mad libs templates) and word lists, then loaded them into a modern AI application, which you can try below:

Launch Full Screen

For more information on Racter visit our tribute page https://racter.ai 

Sources & Links

Check out Leah Henrickson’s wonderfully well-researched “Constructing the Other Half of the Policeman’s Beard” https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/constructing-the-other-half-of-the-policemans-beard/ 

Also, see John Barger’s breakdown of the Racter source code in ‘”The Policeman’s Beard” Was Largely Prefab!’ http://web.archive.org/web/20010210215249/http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/racterfaq.html

To read more about Joan’s other artistic achievements (which go far beyond illustrating Racter’s book) check out this profile on Westbeth Home for the Arts.