The First Computer Love Letters: Manchester, 1952
Abstract
The first known work of computer-generated literature was a love letter. In 1952, Christopher Strachey programmed the Ferranti Mark I at Manchester to churn out ardent, anonymous love notes signed “M.U.C.” (Manchester University Computer). They ran on a fixed set of sentence templates filled with random words from stored lists, and the machine could produce roughly 318 billion different letters. Strachey pinned the results on the department notice board, to his colleagues’ amusement. The program predates Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA by fourteen years.
The Trick
The program understood nothing. Each letter opened with a two-word salutation, an adjective and a noun chosen at random (“Darling Sweetheart,” “Dear Jewel”), then built five sentences from two fixed skeletons, “You are my [adjective] [noun]” and “My [adjective] [noun] [adverb] [verb] your [adjective] [noun],” with every blank filled from the matching word list. It signed off “Yours [adverb], M.U.C.” Most of the vocabulary came from a thesaurus. A typical result:
DARLING SWEETHEART YOU ARE MY AVID FELLOW FEELING. MY AFFECTION CURIOUSLY CLINGS TO YOUR PASSIONATE WISH. MY LIKING YEARNS FOR YOUR HEART. YOU ARE MY WISTFUL SYMPATHY: MY TENDER LIKING. YOURS BEAUTIFULLY M.U.C.
The random choices came from the Ferranti Mark I’s built-in hardware random number generator, a feature included on Alan Turing’s recommendation. Strachey, who had gotten access to the machine by asking Turing for its manual, knew the output was “a rather simple trick” and said the computer was “not really thinking at all.”
Why It Matters
A machine built for artillery tables and prime factorization had been made to produce text whose only job was to sound like feeling. That is the same illusion ELIZA would trade on in 1966 and that large language models trade on now: fluent, emotionally colored output with no comprehension behind it. Strachey got there first, in 1952, and treated it as a joke.
The media artist David Link reconstructed the algorithm from Strachey’s surviving notebooks and rebuilt a working version, LoveLetters_1.0 (2009), which has been exhibited in galleries. The fuller story, including Strachey’s later work on the language CPL and on denotational semantics, is in Christopher Strachey.