Acrostic Finder

pooted
principal
officers
of
the
executive
department

astronauts
among the several
States, and with the Indian
Tribes; To establish an uniform
Rule
of
Naturalization,
and
uniform Laws on
the
subject

political
Person held to Service
or
Labour
in one State, under
the Laws thereof, escaping
into another, shall, in
Consequence of
any
Law

wiseasses
When vacancies happen
in the representation of any
State in the Senate, the
executive
authority of such
State
shall issue writs of
election to fill
such

postwoman
proportion which the number
of
such male citizens shall bear
to the
whole number
of
male citizens twenty-one years of
age in such State. 3.
No

criminals
Cases of
Rebellion or
Invasion the public Safety
may require
it.
No Bill of
Attainder or ex post facto
Law
shall

_{--These poems were generated from the U.S. Constitution}

The code for this is written in Java, and can be found here

This program was a by-product of working on my Spam Poems and inspired by @acrostik on twitter. This is a java program which will find emergent acrostic poems in text using a dictionary trie approach. The program itself is relatively simple, the power of the trie makes what initially seems like an n^2 problem run in nlog(m) time. Searching text for encoded acrostic poems is exciting in that it bypasses most of the intent that comes with writing anything (with some exceptions) and is really poking at the structure of grammar and the variety & location of word use. I think projects like this, and this is a small example, are a way of opening up language as a system at an oblique and interesting angle.