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The name "garden path" reminds me that during my Turbo Pascal loving 80s I played with making “fog” from markov chains. The idea was to computer-generate reaso
by willvarfar 11y ago
The name "garden path" reminds me that during my Turbo Pascal loving 80s I played with making “fog” from markov chains. The idea was to computer-generate reasonable-reading nonsense text and I'm sure you've all tried it as kids too! :)
Of course my naive approach suffered from lack of corpus; if it picked a rare word, it’d get railroaded into using the very limited set of words that follow that rare word and so on.
I remember running it - this was before the internet days, so I can’t imagine where I got the input text from - and getting back a page-full of gobbledygook. And there right in the middle, somehow drawing the eye like a magnet, was one of those railroaded sentences:
herbaceous
Well when your random roulette picks the word herbaceous, its likely only seen it once or so in its learning text, so there aren’t so many words it can pick next:
herbaceous border
So far so good. But where does this lead next?
herbaceous border disputes
Love it!
- Swizec 11y agoI could swear you've posted this exact comment before. Or is it a meme by now? Google finds four results of this phrase: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-spam-posts-on-a-forum-i-keep-an-eye-on-are http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-s... https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sgght/comparing_automatic_poetry_generators/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sgght/comparin...? https://www.reddit.com/comments/108q4b/markov_chain_poem_trainergenerator_in_29_sloc_of/?sort=qa https://www.reddit.com/comments/108q4b/markov_chain_poem_tra... http://encode.ru/threads/2225-A-jackhammer-it-doesn%E2%80%99t-have http://encode.ru/threads/2225-A-jackhammer-it-doesn%E2%80%99... But it turns out all of those are you. Does your computer beep every time somebody posts about markov chains, so that you can go post this comment? Do you have it saved on your machine, ready for copy paste? I feel like I'm in an XKCD strip right now.
- willvarfar 11y agoYeap, all me. Its one of my fondest recollections of early programming. :) So sorry it offends you.
- HCIdivision17 11y agoHeh, I think it's actually useful. Cross-posting is sort of a form of intellectual cross-pollination; some people are allergic, but others appreciate the second chances. I don't read those other forums, so I'd have missed out on that little nugget. And I tried to make that last sentence a garden path one, to keep the comment on topic, but jeez it's hard to break the habit of avoiding them. I suspect it's deeply ingrained in me to an instinctual level by my 11th grade rhetoric teacher. (Her whole goal was to, and I quote, "make our insides scrunch when we saw a comma splice." Most who took her class would agree her curriculum was a resounding success, even after she also taught us to break the rules.)
- Swizec 11y agoYou misunderstand. It doesn't offend me. It is a delightful incident. herbaceous border disputes has become one of my favourite stories about markov chains. It's part of internet lore for me :)
- uououuttt 11y agoWhoa, did you realize that you commented on it 3 years ago in that second reddit link? Anyway, no harm in sharing willvarfar. First time I've seen your comment!
- taliesinb 11y agoThat got surreal fast!
- feintruled 11y agoBut this is wonderful! In the context of the discussion.. The guy who had told the story before who had told the guy who had told the story before had forgotten had forgotten.
- mcphage 11y ago> Google finds four results of this phrase > Does your computer beep every time somebody posts about markov chains I haven't done any actual counting, but I'm like 80% sure Markov Chains have been mentioned more than 4 times on the internet.