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

Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1339–1347, Austin, Texas, November 1-5, 2016. c⃝2016 Association for Computational Linguistics Poet Admits // Mute Cypher: Beam Search to find Mutually Enciphering Poetic Texts Cole Peterson and Alona Fyshe University of Victoria cpeterso@uvic.ca, afyshe@uvic.ca 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 un- der 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 “writabil- ity”. Our algorithm, Beam Verse, is a beam search which uses new heuristics to navigate the cipher-space. We find thousands of ci- phers which score higher than successful ci- phers used to write Xenotext constrained texts. 1 Introduction For over a decade, poet Christian B¨ok has been working on The Xenotext (B¨ok, 2008), a literary ex- periment which aims to insert poetry into the DNA of an extremophile organism. In contrast to pop- ular modern data storage mediums like paper and hard disks, DNA is more robust to accidents, and requires minimal maintenance to last hundreds or even thousands of years (Cox, 2001). Many groups are actively pursuing efficient and stable ways to use DNA to encode information (Shimanovsky et al., 2002; Goldman et al., 2013). With his project, B¨ok aims to leave a lasting cultural contribution inside of an organism, which, as a result of DNA’s durabil- ity and self-replicating properties, could conceivably survive longer than all other existing works of art. Furthermore, B¨ok aims to craft his poem so the protein it instructs the cell to produce is yet an- other English poem. In a sense, B¨ok not only turns a microbe into a genetic book, he also engineers the microbe to be, in a sense, a poet. The organ- ism’s molecular machinery powers this translation between the two texts, which, at a high level, is a symmetric substitution cipher between the letters, and is described in more detail in Section 2. The two poems (the poet’s and the organism’s) must both play by the rules we refer to as the Xenotext Con- straints: • Each text is valid natural language. • The substitution cipher function applied to one text, results in the other text, and vice versa. In other words, the cipher function must be sym- metric. • Whitespace characters (space, new line) enci- pher themselves, and are the only characters al- lowed identity mappings. After four years of work, B¨ok successfully wrote two English poems which satisfied the Xenotext constraints1, becoming the first person to do so. The first challenge was finding a cipher which allows for two valid English texts to be written. Finding “writable” ciphers is difficult and is the focus of this paper. We present Beam Verse, a language-agnostic al- gorithm driven by the target language’s n-gram data, that searches …

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