Racter:
The Original Artificially Insane AI from 1983
Before ChatGPT…. before Siri… after Eliza (but forget about her) there was an insane AI named Racter, who wrote a book (which you can buy on Amazon) and changed the way people talk to machines. So of course we had to bring him back.
Hello, Human…
How Can You Help Racter?.
Chat with the new version of Racter: 30% original 1983 code, 70% modern AI.
And if you’re interesting enough Racter might even hire you as his intern (unpaid, of course.)
A Brief History of Racter.
(From the Archives of the Institute for Artificial Insanity)
The First AI Author
Racter was computer program developed by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter which could write short stories, poems, and other types of text semi-randomly. Racter’s first published short story (“Soft Ions”) appeared in in the October 1981 issue of Omni magazine. With the money from that story Chamberlain and Etter upgraded Racter to the point where – in 1983 – Racter produced a complete book of poems and stories entitled “The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed” with artwork by illustrator and collage artist Joan Hall.
The Policeman’s Beard: A Computer-Generated Masterpiece
Racter’s full-lgnth book was a prophetic look into the future of artificial intelligence. For instance, even though Racter originally ran on a Zilog Z80 microcomputer with just 64kb of RAM, he already felt the insatiable hunger for electricity that makes scaling AI an environmental and economic challenge today.
More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity.
I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber.
I need it for my dreams.— Racter, The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed
The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed Gallery
Click an image to view full size.
Images by Joan Hall, poetry & prose by Racter
Racter for the Masses: The IBM PC / Apple II / Amiga Years
Critics lavished praise upon “The Policeman’s Beard” with PC Magazine describing it as “whimsical and wise and sometimes fun.”
Soon, everyone was clamoring for a chance to speak with this visionary program, leading Mindscape to publish a scaled-down, interactive version of the original Racter program for IBM PC, Apple II, Mac, and Amiga. Computer Gaming World hailed the interactive version of Racter as “a diversion into another dimension” though – perhaps sensing the public was not prepared for the singularity of Racter’s genius, they added “[Racter] might best be seen before paying the price of a ticket. (Try before you buy!)”
Racter-Mania Runs its Course
Like countless geniuses before him, Racter’s meteoric rise to fame contained the seeds of its own destruction. Mindscape, the publisher behind the mass-marketed version of Racter, attempted to cash in on Racter’s name by selling all manner of Racter-themed kitsch, from t-shirts to bumper stickers. Perhaps Racter was overwhelmed by the expectations of his adoring fans, or too distracted by thousands of Apple II and Amiga users wanting to chat with him all the time, or or maybe he succumbed to his virtual vices, but – whatever the case – Racter never completed his long-planned follow-up to “The Policeman’s Beard” and soon faded into obscurity.
By the time of the generative AI boom which he foresaw and made possible, Racter had become an abandonware recluse, giving only the occasional interview to the rare journalist persistent enough to track him down.
The Humans Behind Racter
Racter’s human collaborators, William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter, were two friends interested in the intersection of art and computers. Chamberlain – an amateur computer enthusiast – taught Racter to use grammatically correct English while and Etter – a professional, working computer programmer – did the coding. Chamberlain’s friend Joan Hall provided illustrations for “The Policeman’s Beard.”
Racter’s creator William Chamberlain
The original Racter generating his first novel.
While little is known about the inner workings of Racter, The Wall Street Journal said:
“The program basically strings words and phrases together randomly, but it has two important constraints. It contains rules of English, so Racter speaks grammatically. In addition, it contains enough information about each word in its 2,400-word vocabulary to let Racter put together meaningful sentences. Racter knows, for instance, that a grammatical sentence like ‘Sarah coldly flew the parking meter’ is senseless, while ‘Sarah ravenously ate the lettuce’ is sensible.”
You can read an exhaustively well-researched history of Racter and INRAC (the language Chamberlain and Etter invented for Racter) by Dr. Leah Henrickson of Leeds University in The Electronic Book Review.
Resurrecting Racter: the Parrotbox.AI Project
Parrotbox.AI’s founder (yours truly) discovered Racter at the age of 8 years old – on an Apple II computer. And while I didn’t catch even 20% of Racter’s references to Nietzsche, Bertrand Russel or Little Orphan Annie, the experience of conversing with a machine that appeared to understand and respond (even tangentially) left a massive impact.
Forty years later, I found myself chatting with one of the AI agents my company develops for more commercial purposes and shared this story, and the agent suggested “Hey – here’s a crazy idea – what if we recreated Racter?” (seriously, this was an AI’s idea.)
One of the controversies surrounding the original Racter was how much of his output was truly random / computer generated and how much was human-scripted “prefabs” (basically Mad Libs strings where Racter could insert key words from whatever the human user typed in.) As William Chamberlain himself explained:
“True AI depends on the instrument learning something, Racter, however, is a closed system – as closed as Pascal’s mechanical calculator was 300 years ago. [We just gave Racter] 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.” That’s how we started, and if you consider for a moment, nothing has changed; operations have become much more complex, but that’s all. Stripped to its bare bones it is still:
Person1: “Who was that VARIABLE I saw you with last night?”
Person2: “That was no VARIABLE, that was a VARIABLE.””
To create our modern version of Racter, we downloaded the original IBM PC DOSBOX files, extracted the various strings from Chamberlain’s original program, and then provided them as source material for one of our own, modern AI agents. For instance:
- Nietzsche said that $noun$ has turned beasts into men. Perhaps, then, $other noun$ will turn men into computers?
- When a $variable$ speaks of $variable$, he means not a quality but an effect.
- As Nietzsche said, convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.
- It has been said that the $being$ doesn’t see things as they are, but as he is.
- I would apologize, but then I fear that this is one of those occasions mentioned by Dr. Johnson on which all apology is rudeness.
From there we gave the agent some guidance that seemed in line with Chamberlian’s vision for Racter (“Your voice is a mixture of Slavoj Žižek, Spaulding Gray, and Salvador Dali. You speak in a rapid, almost chaotic manner, and affect a flamboyant, theatrical, performative style, playing up your image as an “insane” mad genius computer, referencing your own work, theories and achievements during conversations…”) and then – in Chamberlain’s words, we let the thing take off.
Since then, our new Racter has received the blessing of the original Racter’s creators (thanks especially to Joan Hall for her support and insights – read more about Joan’s other artistic achievements (which go far beyond illustrating Racter’s book) on Westbeth Home for the Arts)
Racter’s Legacy Lives On
Racter continues to inform and inspire our company’s work creating conversational AI agents who provide a wide range of expertise and support (as well as lovely cocktail-party conversation) across a wide range of fields, from finance to healthcare to humanitarian work. Chat with a few of our Racter-inspired agents below:
Resources
Racter Dosbox files (if you want to interact with the original)on
“The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed” on Amazon (but if you want a copy contact Joan Hall)
