'Blank' Dead Sea

A passage excerpted from  ‘The Policeman’s Beard is Half-Constructed: Computer Prose and Poetry’

The Policeman’s Beard Is Half Constructed is a 1984 collection of poems and short prose that was touted as “the first book ever written by a computer.”

It is generally agreed that the sophistication claimed for the program was likely exaggerated.

The book’s “author,” Racter — short for Raconteur — was an artificial intelligence computer program written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter that generated English language prose at random.

….

Šárka

The story of Šárka (a woman’s name) is a myth dealing with events in the “Maidens’ War” in seventh-century Bohemia. It first appeared in the twelfth-century Chronica Boëmorum of Cosmas of Prague, and later in the fourteenth-century Dalimil’s Chronicle. Following the death of Libuše, Vlasta leads a band of Amazons against the male forces of Libuše’s widower, Přemysl. Šárka, Vlasta’s lieutenant, entraps a band of armed men led by Ctirad by tying herself to a tree and claiming that the rebel maidens tied her there and put a horn and a jug of mead out of reach to mock her. Ctirad believes her story and unties her from the tree, whereupon she pours the mead for the men as a celebratory thank-you gift. Little do the men know that Šárka and the maidens have put a sleeping potion into the mead. When all the men have fallen asleep, Šárka blows the horn as a signal for the rebel maidens to come out of their hiding places and join her in slaughtering the men. She is captured and defeated along with the rest of the army soon afterward (From Wikipedia). See alsohere Cabinet card.

Petticoat ca.1887