Posted by Mark on July 28, 2003 at 13:15:45:
In Reply to: Re: two suggestions for version 2.0 posted by Phil M on July 28, 2003 at 04:27:33:
: My only complaint at the moment is that shorter poems do seem to be thriving (though #11865 seems to have bucked the trend), but that would be entirely because the 'environment' consists of people with different tastes than mine, I presume, and so I count myself as an outlying environmental effect.
Somewhere else I posted to the effect that a poem has, broadly speaking, two components: content and structure. I think we're seeing early variation in the direction of brevity because, in a few words, it's possible to be evocative while avoiding the risk of jarring grammatical error. But that trend followed to its logical end results in a "poem" of one or two words, and that violates the structure that most of us expect of a poem. So I think we can expect to see two brahnching divergences: one in the direction of brief poetic content, and the other in the direction of longer poetic structure. Ideally, in the long run the two populations will interbreed and develop quality text of greater length.
But here's a suggestion for v2, which assumes that it's not already a part ov v1: build in a chance for mutation in the direction of elaboration. Maybe a certain percentile chance that two breeding partners will simply be added to one another, rather than snipped and combined. That could provide a corrective away from the brevity culdesac.