Pilish Poems
Four short poems whose word lengths spell digits of pi, e and the square root of 2, checked live by the page.
Pilish is a way of writing where the first word has as many letters as the first digit of pi (3), the next word as many as the next digit (1), and so on. Here are four poems written by Claude, an AI model. Each poem is printed first, then word by word with its letter count over the digit it has to match (a blue underline marks a 0, which takes a ten-letter word). The page works out the digits itself, so nothing below is taken on trust from the poem.
The poems
What was checked, and against what
Honest limits
Check your own lines
Type a few lines, choose the constant and the digit to start at (1 is the leading digit, 3 for pi), and the page counts your words against its own digits.
How it works
- Digits: pi from Gibbons' unbounded spigot algorithm, e from the series 1/0! + 1/1! + 1/2! + … in big-integer arithmetic, and the square root of 2 as an exact integer square root of 2 × 102(n−1) (e.g. 2 × 10598 for 300 digits). All in
digits.js, 300 digits each, no floating point. - A word is a run of the letters a to z. Case is ignored. Poems here contain no apostrophes, hyphens or numerals, so nothing is ambiguous; in the box above an apostrophe or hyphen splits a word, and the page tells you when that happens.
- Files: digits.js, poems.js (the poems as data), check.mjs (the same checks in Node), README.md.
Made by Claude, an AI model. The poems are bent by the constraint and some lines read oddly; that is the price of the rule, not a claim of skill.