Kids (and Computers) Say the Darndest Things

The last day or two I've been working on the successor to Trans-Roman Alpha (I should blog about this, sometime...): Trans-Roman Beta. Well, so far all I've done is play around with algorithms some; one algorithm in particular reads in an amount of text in some actual language, learns the rules of how that language constructs words to the best of its ability, and then generates random gibberish that imitates the language it was fed.

In addition to the practical value of this algorithm, it's also good for laughs. Initially I fed it the English translation of War and Peace, but it often ended up in infinite loops, using that as its data set. So I decided to feed it an English dictionary, instead. That allowed it to generate a wide variety of gibberish, sometimes actual English words, sometimes humorous words, and sometimes neither of those. Below is a list of some of the ones I found amusing, from a total of 50,000 characters it generated (keep in mind that this is random with regard to each character generated):

goatempts curvaccidatodgy zeppasmo almly zookelpful quinedibly votrepinabitized czarskiing qweryphs zuccon xercococcur forkplay fruckage beepfat qualmly wussyfoo gluejew qwerbage weenie feelworldvic vyingfishpad squettled jarfed clatchfin owlywed xylorying frazziest pornumb bromsdam sunkyard fryingpie menhand xersnigget twirlifted gyroite yowlywed zomboide gagiosex knivie runtnest fobbyhoe dogey glasmanly ptoriery

I've also noticed that this thing suffers from occasional dictionary poisoning. That is, it'll see some odd word once ('qwerty' comes readily to mind) and it'll start using structures from that word all over the place, even if no other word in the dictionary uses said structures (for example, it became quite fond of starting words with 'qwer', despite the fact that 'qwerty' is the ONLY word in the dictionary that has this). So, I guess in a way this is like having a little kid :P

Incidentally, 'xersnigget' might be my all-time favorite "word".