Nine Billion Chatbot Sonnets
A sonnet about the maximum possible number of sonnets
Someone programmed computers to define
Maximum numbers of English sonnets
Iambic ten syllables, fourteen lines
Three quatrains and then a closing couplet.
Twenty thousand words could make near endless
Poems, more than universe of atoms!
But grammar, meaning must not offend us
So syntax excludes invalid patterns.
And so, with the unused non-possibles tossed
Nine billion possible sonnets found
Not a googol, not even a mole, the most
Possible sonnets, the high upper bound
Was too many sonnets for human’s grasp
Yet too few to span the galactic expanse.
© 2023 by Tom Tordillo. All rights reserved.
In a game of Go, there are about 250 possible moves each turn, with a typical game lasting for 150 moves, or approxinately 250 to the 150th power possible moves. The numbers of beyond imagination. Yet computers finally mastered the game of Go.
There are something like 10 to the 82nd power atoms in the entire universe.
The English language has about 1 million words, but the vast majority aren’t used. We’d only need about 20,000 to reconstruct just about everything Shakespeare wrote. If we used each of those 20,000 words exactly once, there would be MANY millions of times as many word combinations as there are atoms in the universe.
Yet it’s still a finite number. At some point, a computer will grapple with the total number of word combinations that could produce sonnets, determining “rules” that make certain combinations acceptable, certain combinations rejected. Perhaps a computer could even derive every possible sonnet.
If this results in discovering a “tiny” number — like 9 billion — then someone could read exactly one sonnet per minute for 18 hours per day, no breaks and no vacations, and if they hold to that regime for 80 years, they’d still barely get through 30 million sonnets.
Should we care that an artificial intelligence will probably figure out how to craft most of the sonnets that can be crafted in the English language?
Perhaps we should not be arrogant about our “words” as being our own. Perhaps we’re just racing to express ourselves within time constraints — capturing something in language that is as elusive and illusive as language.
I still enjoy sonnets.
