The first chapter of our text chronicles the contributions of Ada Byron, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, to computing. Issacson chooses to begin his narrative with Ada’s term “Poetical Science” to describe the synergy of math and poetry that defined her character. The era she lived in was at the intersection of Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution.
The similarity of poetry and programming is widely recognized. Richard Gabriel, Distinguished Engineer for Sun Microsystems, says “Writing code certainly feels very similar to writing poetry. When I'm writing poetry, it feels like the center of my thinking is in a particular place, and when I'm writing code the center of my thinking feels in the same kind of place.” You can read his exposition on “The Nature of Poetic Order” at:
http://www.natureoforder.com/library/nature-of-poetic-order.pdf
Stanford University holds an annual Code Poetry Slam:
https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/algorithms-meet-art-code-poetry-slam-held-stanford
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PciJ2lDw9E8&t=24s
Here's a link to some examples from 301 students:
https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~tony/comphist/PoeticalScience.html
Your poem must be about computing or IT, and can follow any meter (Haiku, Iambic Pentameter, etc) and there is no set length, but please, no goofy limericks. For this assignment you will compare your original poem to one that you generate with a prompt to chatGPT. You will need to create an account on chatGPT 3.5 at this link:
https://chat.openai.com/auth/login