Raspberry Can Now Complete Your Poetry

Amazing, isn’t it? Raspberry Pi fuses with Google Search to become a part of your poetry world. Zach Gage accomplished this task in association with Glaciers, an art installation. Just like its natural counterpart, Glaciers took its own time to develop and is still developing as each of its constituent is developing and being sold. Professionally, Zach is a video game creator who holds credits for some special titles like SpellTower and the most fearsome Lose/Lose. The man has already used Raspberry Pi for several other purposes, however, this one has come out as the most interesting one.

For this purpose, Gage attached around forty Raspberry Pis with forty simple Adafruit e-ink screens. Then he linked this system with Google’s search auto-complete function for completion of poetry.

The basic concept that works behind this is the auto-complete function of Google that always strives to auto complete the search string you feed it. Sometimes, it comes up with some very funny options which rhyme and make a poem. Gage programmed the Raspberry Pis for the same purpose. So, as soon as you would feed any query in the system, the programmed version would select the top three phrases associated with it and display the resulting lines on screen. Believe it or not, but many a times the results are very striking and so meaningful that most people would term as poetry.

The screens would refresh on a regular basis because the Pis would keep checking Google for updates every day. Therefore, with some specific phrases, the auto completions might change on a daily basis which means you may have new poems with same phrases. In his own words, “The best paintings you look at a thousand times and you keep seeing new things.”

Glaciers are thus very interesting installations with acute sense of observations.