Fun_People Archive
16 Jun
Infallible Beans

Date: Wed, 16 Jun 93 16:03:21 PDT
To: Fun_People
Subject: Infallible Beans

[If you have seen any of Peter's work on growing music with 0L systems
(Lindenmayer "plant" grammars) you will understand why this netnews
item seemed particularly interesting to us ... -Eedie & Eddie]

 From: <dante@microsoft.com>
 From: ranjit@gradient.cis.upenn.edu (Ranjit Bhatnagar)

Speaking of plant grammars, I went to a symposium about the
grammar of DNA and decided to breed fortune beans, yes, beans
containing written text, and the texts would be randomly
generated from an english grammar encoded in the DNA.  As plants
with different english grammars interbred and mutated, the
fortunes would gradually change.  People would breed the plants
for proper spelling and punctuation, for profundity, and, most
of all, for the accuracy of the fortunes.  It can't fail.  If
we eat the beans that contain inaccurate predictions and plant
the ones that are correct, it is by the very nature of selection
inconceivable that we would not eventually develop a strain
of INFALLIBLE BEANS.

© 1993 Peter Langston