Try it out · Siribhūvalaya

Try it out

Every page of the poem is 729 numbers. Draw a route across one, or try a shape. We read the letters along your route and check them against a Kannada dictionary, and against 200 shuffles of the same letters.

Chapter Page

Drag across the tiles. Your line snaps to rows, columns and diagonals. Drag back, or tap the last tile, to undo.

Letters along your route

To mark a stretch, click its first letter, then its last.

How the check works

Each number is a sound. We join the sounds into letters, then find the Kannada words of six sounds or more that fit, without overlapping. The score is the share of sounds that fall inside words.

Then we shuffle the same letters 200 times and score each shuffle. Real text in reading order beats every shuffle. Letters in a random order do not. The poem's own route beats them all.

Dictionary: the Alar Kannada dictionary by V. Krishna (ODbL) and Wiktionary Kannada (CC BY-SA), 114,365 words.