Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Timecube Rant Generator

I was just goofing around with the Random CS Paper Generator and the Post-Modern Essay Generator and I thought I would take a crack at making my own.

I just finished my first attempt at creating a random Timecube-style rant generator. If you don't know what Timecube is, you really must see it. It's quite the thing.

Here is a typical Timecube rant:

If I tell a human that his 4-corner head (nose, 2 ears and back corner) has only a 1-corner face, the dumb-ass will say to me - "prove it". He knows not that his face is a corner.

Here is a rant generated by my program:

Gene ray is not intelligent. Stay tuned for armageddon. Evil to obama must resign now antiwhite. Time cube students must ignore cube. Time cube is to admit it is proof. Time cube proves you. I am organizing children. Overpopulation is a snot brain to a liar not have 4 is a 360 degree circle.

The program generates random sentences using a Markov model, which treats a sequence of words as a Markov process. The Markov model is trained in advance using a large collection of actual Timecube rants. The first word of each sentence is chosen using another model, which looks at the sorts of words that Gene Ray tends to open his sentences with. There is another model that tries to make sure that each sentence is an appropriate length and ends with the sort of word that Gene Ray tends to end his setences with. I find it ironic that I ended my previous sentence with a preposition.


Looking at a bunch of rants generated by the program, I am only half-satisfied. The good news is that the model does end up ranting about four-way symetry, and frequently employs racist language. The model's biggest weakness is its ignorance of sentence structure. Many of the rants aren't very entertaining because they don't have any sort of sentence structure. Even Gene Ray does adhere to a sort of unconventional grammar, despite the generally incoherent nature of his writing.