A traditional Japanese haiku is three lines with a 5/7/5 syllable count. Robert Bosch (known for his “Domino Art”) proposed a numerical variant: an equation “haiku” where the English-language reading of each part follows the same 5/7/5 pattern. For example:
77 ("seventy seven" = 5 syllables)
+ 123 ("plus one hundred twenty three" = 7 syllables)
= 200 ("equals two hundred" = 5 syllables)Nathan Brixius wrote about framing this as a constraint-satisfaction problem in his article “Creating Equation Haikus using Constraint Programming,” which finds all such A + B = C haikus and poses a further challenge: modify the model to search for other forms of numerical poems (e.g. a five-line “tanka” with a 5/7/5/7/7 pattern).
Send your solutions — equation haikus, tankas, or anything in between — to DecisionManagementCommunity@gmail.com, or open a pull request to add yours here.