[jaynetics]

Reminds me of "Gadsby", a 50.000 word novel without the letter "e":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)

[isolli]

I'd be curious to know if it was easier or harder (or perhaps just as difficult) to write than the French equivalent. [0]

The Wikipedia article goes on to discuss interesting aspects of how the book was translated in different languages, with different self-imposed constraints.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void

[lelag]

I can’t say for certain, but I’d guess that writing without the letter “e” is slightly more difficult in French than in English. For one, “e” is a bit more common in French (around 15% of all letters, versus about 12% in English). But more importantly, French grammar adds extra challenges—like gender agreement, where feminine forms often require an “e”, and the frequent use of articles like le and les, which become unusable.

That said, I think the most impressive achievement is the English translation of the French novel. Writing an original constrained novel is hard enough, but translating one means you can’t just steer the story wherever you like. You have to preserve the plot, tone, and themes of the original, all while respecting a completely different set of linguistic limitations. That’s a remarkable balancing act.

[vodou]

Georges Perec did the same with his novel "La Disparition".

What is almost as impressive is that these novels (at least Perec's) have been translated to other languages.

[koiueo]

I imagine LLMs would excel in this kind of writing these days.

But really impressive for the time.

[lvncelot]

I think it's the exact opposite, as they operate on a token-level, not a character level, which makes tasks like these harder for them. So they would generate a sentence with multiple es in it and just proclaim that they didn't.

(Just tried it, "write a short story of 12 sentences without one occurence of the letter e" - it had 5 es.)

[chillitom]

They’d probably sucks at a challenge like that because they work on tokens and don’t really see individual letters.

There was a post here a little while back asking AI models to count the number of Rs in the word raspberry and most failed.

[Der_Einzige]

I wrote the relevant paper about this:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.15926

https://github.com/Hellisotherpeople/Constrained-Text-Genera...

[probably_wrong]

You don't need to go all the way to LLMs when a simpler approach may do.

Here's a "What if?" on a very similar issue that uses Markov chains: https://what-if.xkcd.com/75/

[mock-possum]

LLMs are usually shit at this kind of wordplay, they don’t understand the rules - words that begin or end or include particular letters, words that rhyme, words with particular numbers is syllables - they’ll get it right more often than wrong, maybe, but in my experience they just aren’t capable catching wrong answers before returning them to the reader, even if they’re told to check their work.

[pyfon]

8 of them on the cover!