People today utilize randomness to program bots in creating poems and literature based off fairly simple grammatical structures and a varying lexicon. However, most people do not know that over three thousand years ago, kings of the Shang Dynasty were implementing the technological equivalent of this at the time to create one of the first forms of writing in human history. Religious leaders would heat cow bones and turtle shells using fire. The heat of the flame would then crack the bone. The king would often ask the Diviner to ask the Heavens a specific question and the cracks would be viewed as the response. These cracks would then be interpreted as messages from the Heavens and relayed back to the king. The Shang would use cow bones and turtle shells because the bones were flat, smooth, and larger than the average animal. This practice became the first form of recorded writing in China. While the people at the time thought the bones cracked a certain way for a reason, these cracks were about as random as the poems created by bots and generators. The difference is people today are far less superstitious and understand that whatever is displayed can have no literal deeper meaning. Despite this fact, people enjoy trying to interpret these randomly generated poems the same way Shang Diviners would interpret cracks in the bone. It is interesting to think that in another three thousand years how people will view our forms of random generation now, especially with the accelerating advancement of technology.
