Love Letter Generator

In 1952, Christopher Strachey wrote a combinatory algorithm for the Manchester Mark 1 computer which could create love letters. The poems it generated have been seen as the first work of electronic literature and a queer critique of heteronormative expressions of love.

Alan Turing's biographer Andrew Hodges dates the creation of the love letter generator, also known as M.U.C., to the summer of 1952, when Strachey was working with Turing, although Gaboury dates its creation to 1953. Hodges writes that while many of their colleagues thought M.U.C. silly, “It greatly amused Alan and Christopher Strachey – whose love lives, as it happened, were rather similar too.” Strachey was known to be gay.

Although this appears to be the first work of computer-generated literature, the structure is similar to the nineteenth-century parlour game 'Consequences,' and the early twentieth-century surrealist game, exquisite corpse. The Mad Libs books were conceived around the same time as Strachey wrote the love letter generator.

It was also preceded by John Clark's Latin Verse Machine (1830-1843), the first automated text generator.