Poems that are also diagrams and algorithms.
Sanskrit poets encoded knight's tours, magic squares and palindromic surfaces into verse, about a thousand years before Euler. This archive reads those compositions as computational objects: one text that is a poem, a figure and a program at once.
Rebuilt from the project originally hosted by the Computational Sciences Laboratory at IIIT-Bangalore. Link-checked and Flash-free.
Pādukāsahasra 30.40. Step through the tour that turns verse 929 into verse 930.
Computation is specifying a structure precisely enough that someone else can reproduce it.
By that definition a chitrakāvya verse is a program. It survives only when read both as sound and as shape. The shapes include wheels, lotuses, drums, swords and chessboards. The readings trace petals, spokes, palindromic symmetry, or the L-shaped jumps of a knight.
A bandha is built to be three things at once: a sound, a shape and a rule. The composer trades execution speed for descriptive density, and Sanskrit's stable word order and single-glyph akṣara make the trade possible.
- Aakāra-citraBandha, the shape-poem
Syllables plotted on a grid form a recognisable figure. The reading rule lives in the figure.
- Gati-citraTuragapadabandha, the path-poem
A verse, a Hamiltonian path and a riddle in one. The knight's tour over a 4×8 board.
- Vinyāsa-citraSarvatōbhadra, the arrangement-poem
“Auspicious in every direction.” Reads the same forward, backward, down and up.