Artificial Versifying by John Peter

In John Peter’s book Artificial Versifying, the English mathematician describes a simple procedure that could be used to make generative poetry in Latin.

Meant as fun for children, the procedure involved selecting letters in a way to produce grammatically and metrically correct poems without any prior knowledge of the language. This system stands as one of the earliest examples of generativity used in a creative endeavor. John Clark would go on to build the Eureka machine between 1832 and 1845, based on Peter’s Artificial Versifying.