a program I designed called Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet uses a recursive approach.178 The program establishes a set of goals for each word—achieving a certain rhythmic pattern, poem structure, and word choice that is desirable at that point in the poem. If the program is unable to find a word that meets these criteria, it backs up and erases the previous word it has written, reestablishes the criteria it had originally set for the word just erased, and goes from there. If that also leads to a dead end, it backs up again, thus moving backward and forward. Eventually, it forces itself to make
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