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Training a neural net to generate British placenames
- wikiwawa 9y agoNot to be a downer but put this one under the category of "it's not AI if a character based ngram model can do it". But fun regardless of the hype-y AI title.
- msla 9y agoThis not only has a name, it has a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect > As soon as AI successfully solves a problem, the problem is no longer a part of AI. snip > Douglas Hofstadter expresses the AI effect concisely by quoting Tesler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."
- smcl 9y agoThere's a subset of Weird Twitter people from the USA who riff on weird UK placenames and sayings every now and then. I frequently have to remind myself how odd they must sound to an outsider. @arr and @livestock put together the "Wobbingpool Police Incident Report" on Something Awful a while back which is a nice example: http://www.somethingawful.com/news/wobbingpool-police-report/ http://www.somethingawful.com/news/wobbingpool-police-report...
- pacaro 9y agoIf you're not British or a serious Anglophile it can be hard to believe that Nempnett Thrubwell or Newton Poppleford are real places. We used to drive to Portishead to listen to Portishead.
- QAPereo 9y agoYears ago, I heard what I thought was the name of a play, "Western Super Mayor" was opening in the UK. A bit of checking and it turned out that it's the town of, Weston-super-Mare; sort of a Latinized version of "Whatevertown-upon-Rivername." I'm pretty sure that if you said, "Weston-super-Mare" to a random collection of Americans, virtually none of them would even recognize what you were saying.
- linksnapzz 9y agoI think that's where John Cleese is from, so this American knows it.
- dri_ft 9y ago> "Whatevertown-upon-Rivername." "Upon-sea", actually, but yes.
- QAPereo 9y agoOh they're seas?! I always (wrongly I guess) assumed that they were all rivers, like Tine, Avon, that kind of thing.
- jwdunne 9y agoAh, to clear confusion, here's some bits on Upon: Kingston upon Thames Newcastle upon Tyne Stratford upon Avon Berwick upon Tweed These are all rivers. Here's a cheat sheet to decipher British names: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_forms_in_place_names_in_the_United_Kingdom_and_Ireland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_forms_in_pla... Usually translates to something mundane. Weston literally means "West Town". EDIT: Got confused by parent wording - upon is used for the river but the above comment is correct: Weston super mare means "Weston upon sea", not that upon is reserved for seas
- dnh44 9y agoGreat Snoring and Little Snoring always cracked me up too. They're lovely sleepy little villages.
- thruflo22 9y agoMiddle Wallop. Upper Wallop and Lower Wallop -- hopefully not too firmly.
- DonaldFisk 9y agoSome more English place names. Nasty: https://binged.it/2tnXxmm https://binged.it/2tnXxmm Ugley: https://binged.it/2eCIKSF https://binged.it/2eCIKSF Matching Tye: https://binged.it/2gQYodA https://binged.it/2gQYodA Barton in the Beans: https://binged.it/2todjh8 https://binged.it/2todjh8 Benny Hill: https://binged.it/2tnXmaT https://binged.it/2tnXmaT Crackpot: https://binged.it/2gQUCRu https://binged.it/2gQUCRu Blubberhouses: https://binged.it/2gReunu https://binged.it/2gReunu
- teamonkey 9y agoMarsh Gibbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Gibbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Gibbon
- pacaro 9y agoWestward Ho! Only British place name with an exclamation mark. The village is named from the book, not the other way around, and was developed to cash in on tourism inspired by the book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westward_Ho https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westward_Ho!
- arethuza 9y agoDallas is also a rather small sleepy village in Moray. I believe there may be another one somewhere.
- Garfgon 9y agoI'm partial to Upper and Lower Slaughter myself.
- arethuza 9y agoMellon Udrigle is one of my favourite Socttish place names.
- grabcocque 9y agoThere's a significant subset of Americans for whom in their mind Britain looks a lot like Narnia. Frankly the preponderance of cutesy Saxon village names that look and sound a lot like these are part of the reason. That and the existence of people like Jacob Rees-Mogg.
- QAPereo 9y agoIt's a little more sinister when you realize how much money, land, and power rests on those frilly, fanciful notions. It's not just Americans, but plenty of British people who fall for the illusion to some degree, much as many Americans buy into "Exceptionalism" or some flavor of nationalism. Often the debate ends up centered around the monarchy, and then dies a quiet death when the turkeys in the HoL fail to support the notion of Thanksgiving.
- tfvghbv 9y agoYou must be a blast at parties.
- grabcocque 9y agoHere's a screenshot of all the local by elections held in the UK on Thursday to compare for accuracy: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFMAyTLXsAAqM16.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFMAyTLXsAAqM16.jpg Pretty good.
- zinckiwi 9y agoLost it at "Fuckley."
- oceanswave 9y agoFor me it was Fapton
- princeb 9y agoBatchington Crunnerton sounds like you found an actor
- nemoniac 9y agoThese are clearly English place names and bear no relation to the rest of Britain.
- irremediable 9y agoThere are several that are clearly Welsh. Possibly a couple that sound Scottish, though that's tricky to tell without confirmation bias...
- arethuza 9y agoYou get a few Welsh sounding place names in Scotland that are actually from the Old Brythonic/Ancient British that was the forerunner of Welsh - Penicuik (Pen Y Cog) outside Edinburgh being one. I don't see anything on the list that looks Gaelic, Norse or the old weird Pictish names...
- adamcharnock 9y agoThis reminds me of a tremendously unhelpful idea that keeps circling my brain: A bot that trains a neural net using code comments from a specific GitHub project. The bot then replaces all the comments in the project with those produced by the neural net, then sends in a pull request. You could also use different training data, perhaps mix in some Mills & Boon.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoBonus points if it only adds comments to previously un-commented sections, especially ones that look complicated.
- jwdunne 9y agoEeesh that's a lot of Stoke. Place names in Britain are extremely arbitrary and I wonder how this impacts. Some of these don't feel quite "right". Here's an interesting story that explains my thinking: There's an area of Salford called Irlams o'th Height. This used to be called the Height as it was elevated over the Irwell. There was a family in the 18th century who owned a pub on the Height. This was the Irlam family. The pub, officially the Park Horse, was locally known as "Irlam's". It was literally "Irlam's on the Height". As the area grew, especially during the industrial revolution, the entire area was just called "Irlam's on the Height". This has continued to this day - nobody really questions it. There's also an area in Salford called Irlam. This is on the opposite side of Salford and has nothing to do with Irlam's pub (perhaps except that may be where the family name originated). The area was called Irwellham - a hamlet on the river Irwell. Salford, to finish, I think is naturally due to a ford. Probably a ford in one of the rivers, perhaps the Irwell again, since Salford emcompassed much of what is now Greater Manchester. Long winded story out of the way, to generate British sounding names, take local natural landmarks/typically British surnames and suffix with "ham", "ton", "chester". Must warn - many will probably exist!
- nerdponx 9y agoImagine some kind of AI that generates place names by simulating entire histories, Dwarf Fortress style.
- curiouser2 9y agoI did this with a list of 10,000 cannabis strain names scraped from a seed database, have had results running on a twitter bot: https://twitter.com/high_learning_ https://twitter.com/high_learning_ my favorites so far: 'Grape Meth', 'Bitch Kush', 'Critical Burple', 'Space Hell'
- mhh__ 9y agoDull - twinned with Boring, Oregon - can be found in scotland.
- mhh__ 9y agoMy connection is too poor to actually read the article: Can it generate welsh (Compound? Not sure) names like the classic "llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch"
- dzhiurgis 9y agoSomeone with no life could scale this out to all countries (plus generate legit street names and person names). You'd get an universal fake-address-generator to rule them all.
- 505 9y agoOn inspection of the examples, perhaps even Dickensian.