Stochastische Texte (Augenblick 1'4)

The October–December 1959 issue of Augenblick, a German literary magazine founded by Max Bense, features possibly the first published example of computer-generated text: Theo Lutz’s Stochastische Texte (Stochastic Texts).

At the time, Bense was a professor of theory of science at the Stuttgart University of Technology, where Lutz was one of his students. He was very supportive when he learned that Lutz was attempting to program the university’s ZUSE Z22 computer not just for statistical analysis of texts but to compose texts. Over the summer of 1969, Lutz collaborated with Bense and Rul Gunzenhäuser—another student of Bense’s, who helped with mathematical modeling of the algorithms—on the project. 

Lutz used Fortran to program the computer to generate sentences stochastically, by recombining words from source material—in this case, 16 adjectives and 16 nouns from Franz Kafka’s 1926 novel The Castle, as well as 4 conjunctions and 4 pronouns—according to pre-set grammatical patterns. A selection of the resulting sentences, all in German, were printed in the magazine. 

The choice of _The Castle _as source text was never officially explained, but recently scholars Hannah B. Higgins and Douglas Kahn have suggested a link between the mechanistic process of stochastic text generation and “the routing systems of social control described in the novel.”