Random walks through poetry

ABSTRACT The contact zone between algorithms and creative writing has become an increasingly fertile ground for literary experimentation in the last decades, with more accessible digital technologies broadening the scope of potential artistic productions and allowing the exploration of new forms of creativity. Inspired by the playful collaboration between arts and sciences embodied by the experimental creations of the French literary group OuLiPo, we borrow from physics and mathematics the concept of self-avoiding random walk to create original poems. This model is adapted here to generate random poems through potentially infinite combinations of a finite set of verses distributed on a virtual two-dimensional grid. The highly versatile algorithm we designed allows to randomly generate unexpected poems and provide, for each, a unique path with the graphical representation of a random walk.