Poet Admits // Mute Cypher: Beam Search to find Mutually Enciphering Poetic Texts

Cole Peterson and Alona Fyshe
University of Victoria


Abstract

The Xenotext Experiment implants poetry into an extremophile's DNA, and uses that DNA to generate new poetry in a protein form. The molecular machinery of life requires that these two poems encipher each other under a symmetric substitution cipher. We search for ciphers which permit writing under the Xenotext constraints, incorporating ideas from cipher-cracking algorithms, and using n-gram data to assess a cipher's ``writability''. Our algorithm, Beam Verse, is a beam search which uses new heuristics to navigate the cipher-space. We find thousands of ciphers which score higher than successful ciphers used to write Xenotext constrained texts.