MOTHERBOARD: As a teenager in Vermont, Sarah Harmon used Java to create a computer program that wrote poetry. She named it OGDEN. Then she submitted one of its poems in 2008 to her high-school literary magazine under the pen name Dan Goshen, an anagram of Ogden Nash.

“They accepted it,” Harmon laughs, “although they did say all these funny things about how abstract it was.”

OGDEN was nothing fancy, she says. It followed predefined rules of grammar and structure to compose poetical-sounding snippets. For example: He was perfectly strange, / His world was shyly hopeless, / Then he tasted his dreams. Read more.