Saturday 25 August 2018
On things vile and fantastic
I came across a silly thing on FaceBook that asked people to use their initials to mix three words to make their Metal-band name, or something like that. Basically it was rule-based text generation at human speed. In the middle of the night I thought it would be amusing to port it to JanusNode and pump it up a little. The output included concepts so vile that I felt like it needed a unicorn chaser, so I also made word lists for super-positive concepts. Here are a few samples of each.
Saturday 10 March 2018
On nazokake
I recently learned about the Japanese riddle form called a nazokake, which is built around a homophone pair. The structure of a nazokake is something like:
How is an X like a Y?
They both have to do with [homophone] Z.
The nice thing about these riddles is that they are very easy to automate (I was not the first to notice this: e.g. see here and here). I found a list of homophones online, and generated their semantic associations using the word2vec model, which bootstraps semantic association from patterns of text co-occurrence. Then I wrote some simple rules for my text generation program JanusNode, to get it to generate riddles of this form. Here are some samples of what it came up with. Enjoy.A dividend is like an odor because they are both about cents (scents).
How is a drumstick like an anthem? They are both about cymbals/symbols.
How is a maternity ward like a sports playoff? They both make me think of births/berths.
How is a goalpost like a cry? They are both related to balls (bawls).
How is a game of billiards like a trolley? They are both about cues/queues.
How is a missile like a daughter? They both have to do with the air (the heir).
How is a commander like a CPU? They both make me think of colonels/kernels.
A stockade is like a waddle because they both have to do with a gate (a gait).
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