beowabbit: (me looking down on vt train)
beowabbit ([personal profile] beowabbit) wrote 2004-03-29 08:13 pm (UTC)

Re: Cool!

If it’s poetry, it’s only partially mine, and partially machine-generated. I seem to have been a bit too subtle about hiding the link in the text. Here, for instance, is some of your poetry.

Basically, it looks at the public entries in your journal, creates tables of the frequency of sequences of words, and generates random text with similar sequences of words. So it’s more grammatical and natural-sounding than random gibberish (“because” is likely to be followed by “of”, and “the” is likely to be followed by nouns) and it’ll even pick up unusual turns of phrase from a journal, but there’s no understanding of the text. Pretty cool, though, I think.

Here's a slightly more detailed description, and here’s information about an early Internet prank using this technique. (I heard a talk once by Rob Pike where he talked about writing the program that generated those random replies to post to the net. He’s a really funny guy.)

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