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

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.