Mark V. Shaney

Template:Short description Template:Use mdy dates Mark V. Shaney is a synthetic Usenet user whose postings in the net.singles newsgroups were generated by Markov chain techniques, based on text from other postings. The username is a play on the words "Markov chain". Many readers were fooled into thinking that the quirky, sometimes uncannily topical posts were written by a real person.

The system was designed by Rob Pike with coding by Bruce Ellis. Don P. Mitchell wrote the Markov chain code, initially demonstrating it to Pike and Ellis using the Tao Te Ching as a basis. They chose to apply it to the net.singles netnews group.

The program is fairly simple. It ingests the sample text (the Tao Te Ching, or the posts of a Usenet group) and creates a massive list of every sequence of three successive words (triplet) which occurs in the text. It then chooses two words at random, and looks for a word which follows those two in one of the triplets in its massive list. If there is more than one, it picks at random (identical triplets count separately, so a sequence which occurs twice is twice as likely to be picked as one which only occurs once). It then adds that word to the generated text.<ref name="curious"/>

Then, in the same way, it picks a triplet that starts with the second and third words in the generated text, and that gives a fourth word. It adds the fourth word, then repeats with the third and fourth words, and so on. This algorithm is called a third-order Markov chain (because it uses sequences of three words).<ref name="curious">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Examples

A classic example, from 1984, originally sent as a mail message, later posted to net.singles<ref name="Party Politics"/> is reproduced here:

Other quotations from Mark's Usenet posts are:<ref name="Jillette"/>

• "I spent an interesting evening recently with a grain of salt." (Alternatively reported as "While at a conference a few weeks back, I spent an interesting evening with a grain of salt."<ref name="SoftPanorama"/><ref name="Change of"/>)
• "I hope that there are sour apples in every bushel."<ref name="Sour"/><ref name="bushel">Template:Cite news</ref> (see also sour grapes)

History

In The Usenet Handbook Mark Harrison writes that after September 1981, students joined Usenet en masse, "creating the USENET we know today: endless dumb questions, endless idiots posing as savants, and (of course) endless victims for practical jokes." In December, Rob Pike created the netnews group net.suicide as prank, "a forum for bad jokes". Some users thought it was a legitimate forum, some discussed "riding motorcycles without helmets". At first, most posters were "real people", but soon "characters" began posting. Pike created a "vicious" character named Bimmler. At its peak, net.suicide had ten frequent posters; nine were "known to be characters." But ultimately, Pike deleted the newsgroup because it was too much work to maintain; Bimmler messages were created "by hand". The "obvious alternative" was software,<ref name="Harrison"/> running on a Bell Labs computer<ref name="Jillette"/> created by Bruce Ellis, based on the Markov code by Don Mitchell, which became the online character Mark V. Shaney.<ref>Harrison, p. 219</ref><ref name="Dewdney"/><ref>Dewdney and Pike both credit Ellis alone. Harrison and Jillette credit both Ellis and Pike.</ref>

Kernighan and Pike listed Mark V. Shaney in the acknowledgements in The Practice of Programming,<ref name="Practice"/> noting its roots in Mitchell's markov, which, adapted as shaney,<ref>Kernighan, Pike, p. 84</ref> was used for "humorous deconstructionist activities" in the 1980s.<ref>Kernighan, Pike. p. 82</ref>

Dewdney pointed out "perhaps Mark V. Shaney's magnum opus: a 20-page commentary on the deconstructionist philosophy of Jean Baudrillard" directed by Pike, with assistance from Henry S. Baird and Catherine Richards, to be distributed by email.<ref name="Dewdney"/> The piece was based on Jean Baudrillard's "The Precession of Simulacra",<ref name="PikeEmail"/> published in Simulacra and Simulation (1981).

Reception

The program was discussed by A. K. Dewdney in the Scientific American "Computer Recreations" column in 1989,<ref name="Dewdney"/> by Penn Jillette in his PC Computing column in 1991,<ref name="Jillette"/> and in several books, including the Usenet Handbook,<ref name="Harrison"/> Bots: the Origin of New Species,<ref name="Leonard"/> Hippo Eats Dwarf: A Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other B.S.,<ref name="Boese"/> and non-computer-related journals such as Texas Studies in Literature and Language.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Dewdney wrote about the program's output, "The overall impression is not unlike what remains in the brain of an inattentive student after a late-night study session. Indeed, after reading the output of Mark V. Shaney, I find ordinary writing almost equally strange and incomprehensible!" He noted the reactions of newsgroup users, who have "shuddered at Mark V. Shaney's reflections, some with rage and others with laughter:"<ref name="Dewdney"/>

The opinions of the new net.singles correspondent drew mixed reviews. Serious users of the bulletin board's services sensed satire. Outraged, they urged that someone "pull the plug" on Mark V. Shaney's monstrous rantings. Others inquired almost admiringly whether the program was a secret artificial intelligence project that was being tested in a human conversational environment. A few may even have thought that Mark V. Shaney was a real person, a tortured schizophrenic desperately seeking a like-minded companion.<ref name="Dewdney"/>

Concluding, Dewdney wrote, "If the purpose of computer prose is to fool people into thinking that it was written by a sane person, Mark V. Shaney probably falls short."<ref name="Dewdney"/>

A 2012 article in Observer compared Mark V. Shaney's "strangely beautiful" postings to the Horse_ebooks account on Twitter and music reviews at Pitchfork, saying that "this mash-up of gibberish and human sentiment" is what "made Mark V. Shaney so endlessly fascinating".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

See also

• Turing test
• Dissociated press
• On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog
• Parody generator

External links

• FAQ for the Plan 9 operating system by Mark V. Shaney
• Unofficial biography
• "Mark V. Shaney at Your Service" online version by Yisong Yue.
• "Mark V. Shaney in Common Lisp" at Racine Systems.
• Every Mark V. Shaney post at Google Groups Usenet archive.
• "Sable Debutante's Journal", a Mark V. Shaney clone at LiveJournal
• markovtxt.c,Template:Dead link markov.c C source code at Bell Labs