biology

Racter

Racter is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Racter rather than just read about it. In short: Racter is an artificial intelligence program that generates English language prose at random. It was published by Mindscape for IBM PC compatibles in 1984, then for the Apple II, Mac, and Amiga.

Key takeaways

Racter belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Racter to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Racter from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Racter is an artificial intelligence program that generates English language prose at random. It was published by Mindscape for IBM PC compatibles in 1984, then for the Apple II, Mac, and Amiga. An expanded version of the software, not the one released through Mindscape, was used to generate the text for the published book The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed.

History

Racter, short for raconteur, was written by William Chamberlain and Thomas Etter. Racter's initial creation was the short story Soft Ions, which appeared in the October 1981 issue of Omni (magazine). The publication's editors bought the story in January 1980, before it had even been written. In exchange for the rights, the editors offered financial support to Chamberlain and Etter so the two could refine Racter. In 1983, Racter produced a book called The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed (ISBN 0-446-38051-2). The program originally was written for an OSI which only supported file names at most six characters long, causing the name to be shorted to Racter and it was later adapted to run on a CP/M machine where it was written in "compiled ASIC on a Z80 microcomputer with 64K of RAM." This version, the program that allegedly wrote the book, was not released to the general public. The sophistication claimed for the program was likely exaggerated, as could be seen by investigation of the template system of text generation. In 1984, Mindscape released an interactive version of Racter, developed by Inrac Corporation, for IBM PC compatibles, and it was ported to the Apple II, Mac, and Amiga. The published Racter was similar to a chatterbot. The BASIC program that was released by Mindscape was far less sophisticated than anything that could have written the fairly sophisticated prose of The Policeman's Beard. The commercial version of Racter could be likened to a computerized version of Mad Libs, the game in which you fill in the blanks in advance and then plug them into a text template to produce a surrealistic tale. The commercial program attempted to parse text inputs, identifying significant nouns and verbs, which it would then regurgitate to create "conversations", plugging the input from the user into phrase templates which it then combined, along with modules that conjugated English verbs. By contrast, the text in The Policeman's Beard, apart from being edited from a large amount of output, would have been the product of Chamberlain's own specialized templates and modules, which were not included in the commercial release of the program.

Reception The Boston Phoenix called the story Soft Ions "schematic nonsense. But the scheme is obvious enough and the nonsense accessible enough to an attentive reader that one can almost believe Chamberlain when he predicts that before long Racter will be ready to write for the pulp-reading public." PC Magazine described some of Policeman's Beard's scenes as "surprising for their frankness" and "reflective". It concluded that the book was "whimsical and wise and sometimes fun". Computer Gaming World described Racter as "a diversion into another dimension that might best be seen before paying the price of a ticket. (Try before you buy!)" A 1985 review of the program in The New York Times notes that, "As computers move ever closer to artificial intelligence, Racter is on the edge of artificial insanity." It also states that Racter's "always-changing sentences are grammatically correct, often funny and, for a computer, sometimes profound." The article includes examples showing interaction with Racter, most often Racter asking the user questions.

Reviews Jeux & Stratégie #47

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Racter

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Racter claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Racter before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Racter ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Racter

In research: Racter appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Racter in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Racter is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Chatbots, Natural language generation, Novelty software, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Racter outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Racter in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Racter means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Racter out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Racter in simple terms?

Racter is an artificial intelligence program that generates English language prose at random. It was published by Mindscape for IBM PC compatibles in 1984, then for the Apple II, Mac, and Amiga.

Why does Racter matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Racter?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Racter.