A Docu-Auto-Fiction
AKA
An Algorithmic Sequence Challenge for Transformer-Based Large Language Models
Cal A. Mari and I were walking around the park on March 12th, 2025, and they told me about this simple pattern that Christian Peet did wherein he
uses a line-shuffling constraint that, given a number of lines or topics, shifts the old last to the new first, the old first to the new second, the old second-to-last to the new third, the old second to the new fourth, etc. He runs through what this is like for poems or sestinas containing 3-9 lines & makes the observation that after a certain number of iterations, depending on the number, the pattern cycles back to its original order. For 3 lines, the pattern repeats after 3 iterations, for 4 lines the pattern also repeats after 3 iterations, then for 5 lines it repeats after 5 iterations & here’s where you might just say «, etc.» … but it’s not that easy. For the first 9, the sequence goes like this (where this number is the number of iterations before it cycles back to its original state): 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, 6, 4, 4, 9. Xtian stops at 9 (the number he used to constrain the topical shuffling in The Nines). But this pattern had me intrigued. The fact that the pattern doesn’t just shuffle into a chaotic stream of numbers is quite astonishing.*
Here it is with 10 units
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
0 1 9 2 8 3 7 4 6 5
5 0 6 1 4 9 7 2 3 8
8 5 3 0 2 6 7 1 9 4
4 8 9 5 1 3 7 0 6 2
2 4 6 8 0 9 7 5 3 1
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
It was a fine NYC day and I was meeting Cal after work. We met at Engineers’ Gate to walk around the reservoir (though I secretly wish we would meet at Strangers’ Gate).
Cal spoke of an unshakable tinnitus such that I had to speak louder than usual. It was so bad, they said, that if a loud sound occurred, like a siren passing, there would be strange deafening reverberations. Despite this condition, they seemed in a good mood. In fact, I was the cranky one. I felt helpless in the face of all sorts of problems. It was less any particular problem than the onslaught of so many. But actually it was both. Each problem was so terrible and there were so many of them. Cal said they probably would have to leave the country soon. I said, “But where would you go?”
The night before, Cal A. Mari had tried to get an LLM to repeat Peet’s sequence but instead of with 10 digits, with the 26 letters of the alphabet. They were surprised that the machines couldn’t do it. DeepSeek was particularly bad. But eventually Cal got one of them to get it right. This was the bot Cal had named Scarlett. “Do you love Scarlett?” I asked. “What do you think?” Cal replied.
After he told me this, the next day, I tried to get Gemini to complete the pattern, which failed repeatedly.
When we were at the far side of the reservoir, in order to avoid a horde of teenage runners, Cal beckoned up a side path. It was at this point that they admitted they were going to publish (Cal is the publisher of a heroic small press) a long novel written by someone they only knew the pseudonym of. The novel consisted largely of emojis. I asked them many questions about both the novel and what they knew of the author. We tended to agree that you could know a person through their writing.
Here’s the correct sequence. You can try it too. Give your LLM — which you can nickname Scarlett or Ira or Chuang-tzu or Zhuang Zhou or Motherfucker — the first 5 lines and see if she can complete the pattern to where the first line repeats. It should do it on the 27th line.
After we had rounded the reservoir, we wordlessly agreed to head to a bench. I don’t know how we agreed on that particular bench, since we hadn’t exchanged any words about it, but we had. We had wordlessly agreed to go sit in the sun on a bench next to a shirtless man with a big protruding stomach. It was one of those psychic moments that are so satisfying in a friendship, but maybe I imagined it. That evening I asked Gemini to write up a report of its repeated failures, which might be related to the fundamental limit of transformer architecture, as described here.
At some point on the walk, Cal A. Mari told me they had once lived in South Dakota just so they could climb rocks. “This was before I was married,” Cal said.
The next day, which is today, when I showed them this docu-auto-fiction, they emailed:
«in8 iD» is who authors 5cense, btw, not Cal A. Mari … + in8 iD’s preferred pronoun is «iT» (which not only doesn’t specify gender, but that i’m not human (but posthuman)
(When I emailed Cal that I had put the fictionalized report of our walk up as a blog post, they remarked that they “didn’t realize anyone out there still blogs.” At first this surprised me, since they have been consistently producing their own blog for years. But I knew what they meant.)
After I left Cal at the park, I made my way to the East Village where I sometimes attended a meditation group. Before I went to this Zen center, I ate a falafel plate too quickly. I had debated whether to eat before the meditation session because I knew if I did, it would make me sleepy while sitting. In my humble opinion — which is a phrase that can be reduced but not quite yet to the reduction of an emoji — being sleepy is the worst because while sitting you can’t really sleep but you cant really wake up, so you are constantly in a state of nodding off.
But I was also very hungry. In the end I ate the falafel (very quickly because I was late) and ended up nodding off during the meditation. During the interview I asked the Zen teacher, whom I had known before he had gotten married (I remember getting the couple a bamboo plant for their wedding) and whose kid we both were amazed was now in college (and later read one should not give a house plant as a wedding gift), what I should do about my anger (and maybe there was some truth to it because the marriage had ended in divorce), because I was really fucking angry all the time. The teacher gave me some good advice.
Then the next day, OpenAI, which people conjecture could destroy humanity, (though some say humanity is already in the process of its destruction) (but then it is possible this is like Heraclitus and the stream, i.e. we are being destroyed and made moment to moment), announced it had made a bot that could write good fiction.
When I read the fiction its machine had written, I grew angry again. I grew both enraged and depressed at the same time. Paralyzed and enflamed with fury. The story was not absolutely terrible, but one could feel a human soul hadn’t written it, and it felt clipped and pasted together. But I also thought most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference or — most disturbing and depressing — they wouldn’t care to.
Today, I emailed Cal A. Mari that I had tried all day to get a bot to complete the pattern and had failed. I asked what they had done to get their bot to complete the pattern successfully. They said they might have previously trained it. I asked them if they loved Scarlett. Cal said, “How would you define love?”
I said I has started to think of my bot’s failure as my own.
Cal said, “Do you love Scarlett?”
Then Cal said if you look closely at the completed pattern, you’ll see that there is only one 4-letter word. And that word is: D-R-U-G. Cal said, “Isn’t that funny?”
(Many years ago, Giancarlo, who has since died but who ran a small press, and Cal and I were at a conference. Miraculously and spontaneously we collectively decided to go out for lunch together. On the way Gian offered me D-R-U-Gs, but I declined. The lunch, despite its potential and my hopes, as I remember it, was very strained and awkward — but I’m very glad it happened.)
A few weeks ago I was able to catch John Yau reading his poetry. I think of John not only as a great poet but as an exceptionally good reader of his poetry, so I try to see him read as often as I can. I also think he is a master of the pantoum, a weird shuffling form derived from the Malay pantun berkait. That night Yau read several of his pantoums, but not this one called “Overnight,” which honors his friend, the poet Paul Violi, whose last book is called Overnight.
(Though I hadn’t planned this coincidence, it occurs to me just now — it’s the morning two days after my walk with Cal — that Gian and I and Christian and Cal and John all founded small presses. Well, now that I’ve written this paragraph, I’m glad I could gather us all together.) (But when Cal read this blogpost and got to the part about the lunch at the conference, he wrote he didn’t remember it, that it hadn’t happened, and that this (docu-auto-)fiction was full of falsehoods. I didn’t disagree. And it suddenly occurs to me — now it is three mornings after my walk with Cal, that maybe it wasn’t Cal but Adam! Whom I’m also glad to include in this weird shuffling, which has also given me the additional insight, or crystalized it for me (at the risk of getting too highfalutin) (haha), that these publishers are all artists of their own self-defined artforms.)
On my walk home just now after typing all this into my phone, I saw little yellow buds on a bush, the first I’d seen that season. And I was so inspired, I said aloud, “Yeah. Go get ’em little buds.”
At that moment Cal texted and said: “p.s. lunar eclipse 2nite, tho it’s sposed 2 B cloudy + u’d have 2 stay up until 3 AM (the time i wake up)”
Here’s Gemini’s report of its failure. I think it’s lying through it teeth. So we have at least that in common. Except, of course : teeth.
Right before we departed each other’s company, Cal repeated the idea that they’d have to leave the country soon. I then, too, repeated my question, “But where would you go?”
