Darwinian Poetry Welcome to Darwinian Poetry! The goal of this project is to see if non-negotiated collaboration can evolve interesting poetry using (un)natural selection. Huh? Ok, here's the idea: starting with a whole bunch (specifically 1,000) randomly generated groups of words (our "poems"), we are going to subject them to a form of natural selection, killing off the "bad" ones and breeding the "good" ones with each other. If enough generations go by, and if the gene pool is rich enough, we should eventually start to see interesting poems emerge. The cool part is that YOU are the arbiter of what constitutes "good" and "bad" poetry. Once you start, you will be presented with two poems. In all likelihood they will both be abyssmal pieces of nonsensical garbage. That's ok. All you have to do is read them both and pick the one you find more appealing, for whatever reason. Your decision might be based on a single word that you happen to like. It doesn't matter. Just pick whichever one strikes your fancy. Once you choose a poem, your vote will be recorded and two more poems will appear. Keep doing this for as long as you like, and definitely come back frequently. Over time the poems picked by you, and I hope by thousands of other people, will interbreed and more and more interesting poems will emerge. It could take a while. Weeks...months...I don't know. It all depends on how many people participate, and how often. Keep coming back, for (I hope) the population will evolve steadily, so each day could bring increasingly interesting poems. That's it. Just click on the "Get Started" link below to dive right in. Or click the "Get Report" link to find out what the current highest rated poem is, as well as to see other statistics. System Requirements None. Well, a computer and a browser. Any browser. Netscape, IE, Safari, Opera, whatever. It could be NCSA Mosaic on a 386, GistIt on your Blackberry, or Lynx on a VT100 terminal. Pure HTML, baby. Javascript is for sissies and posers. Get Started Get Report How Does This Work? Bulletin Board Please sign my Guest Book! Find any pearls among all the nonsense? If you come across something good in Darwinian Poetry, post it to the bulletin board. Be sure to include the poem number; it will help determine the "age" of the poem later on. At some point I'll try to gather the gems and put them on a page. You may also be interested in Exquisite Corpse. (Thanks to Ralph Craig and "claudine" for posting this to the bulletin board.) You can also email me, although I'd rather you posted general comments to the bulletin board.