Self Care Bear Central

Neural networks are a type of machine learning program that learns from examples they’re given, rather than relying on a human programmer to invent rules.

In an earlier experiment, I trained a neural network to write new names for Dungeons and Dragons spells based on a list of 365 examples. That’s a really small dataset for a neural network to work with, and I ended up struggling to find training parameters that would strike a balance between word-for-word mimicry of the original list of spells, versus a series of completely made-up words. By filtering extensively through the nonsense, I was able to come up with a short list of interesting new spells. (My favorites were Barking Sphere and Gland Growth).

However, blog reader Jo Scott was kind enough to collect the entire 4th edition list of spells - more than 1,300 spells in all. She explained that she’s playing a character who’s an artificer trying to create an autonomous spellcasting golem - essentially, a magical AI - and she’d like to have more weird spells for the golem to invent. (Her Dungeon Master okayed this and thus only has herself to blame when she has to deal with some of the spells listed below.)

Using the new dataset I was able to train a much better-performing neural network. It simply had many more examples of spells to work with; that is, more examples of the words and letter combinations that appear in D&D spells, and thus was able to deduce better rules about how to create them.

For comparison, here’s what the neural network trained on the original spell dataset was producing after it had looked through the spell list 30 times. This is raw, unfiltered output from the neural network.

Original dataset

Wome on frr Eser Wold Sereisk Lelent Warder Cleater Secfen Spiritul Plage Arawen Speak with Alanc Plonting Cloud Aurars Ensntalice Stige Dling Comenthon of Prost Monsen Scink Warrifg Resser RestractiGn Cloud Sreeat Glasp Blenss Bline Ons Dood to Stone

Aside from a couple of spells that just might work, most of the list is magicky-sounding nonsense, sometimes barely pronounceable.

By contrast, this is what the neural network was producing after it had been trained on the dataset that included all the 4th edition spells:

Full dataset

Curse Word Crackling claus Tidal treket Swirk with Wall of Storm Acter Lor distertion Glib ton Grasping Mane Tweel Strike Revitalizing Strike Truneming fortune Fall of the Wild Tunesrite Trickstrak empester Phantasmal assault Tidalt Atight Hadabol Leging Blade Bund Wind Dance of Sack and Prime Poxsare Dumination Mass Cure Fortion

They’re not ALL winners, but the difference is dramatic. This is why, although I can often have fun with small datasets, the really large ones (100,000+ metal bands, or 19,000 IPA beers) tend to produce the most consistently convincing results.

Even this more-sophisticated neural network is not without some oddities. For example, you’ll notice in the results below that it seems to have a particular fondness for bears. And it has invented the name “Dave” which is now, for some reason, its favorite.

I leave you with a selection of Dungeons and Dragons spells generated by the latest neural network.

Mister of Light Storm of the gifling Song of goom Forceful Boor Chorus of the dave Maine storm Frames of Death Song of the doom goom Death’s Death’s Proud Bear Wall of Distraction Date wards Plant of Peace Shield of Farts Song of the darn Ward of Snade the Pood Beast Ice shop Primal Rear Summon Storm Bear Divine Boom Soul of the bill Charm of the dave Spirit of the Spirit Fire shop Song of blord Song of distraction Forceful Force Spirit Boating Song of the ball Hail to the Dave Crusading Disk Summon ass Call to the Daring Treeking of Star Grasping Light Clinging blade Primal Prayer Bear War Cape Find Strike Song of the Unworthy Gate Sail Icon of Thorns Song of the door Star warper Stone of Death Chilled arrow Storm of the dave Fark Mate Charm of the cods Death of the Sun Greater flick Curse Clam Claming Blow Cursing wink Conjure Mare Remorse? Conjure Bark Darkworm Colt Daving fire Healing of Bat Mordenkainen’s lucubrabibiboricic angion

There are more of these because I had way too much fun generating spells, but to include them all here would make this post ludicrously long. As usual, you can get the extended list by entering your email at this link (even if you’re already on my mailing list). Just for fun, the extended list isn’t QUITE as filtered to remove all the sweary words.

At my work, the weekly kids craft has been solar eclipse buttons. I made my own versions at break.

Commissioned art by @birdrhetorics​

Hate of pigeons didn’t start until the 20th Century. Before that was about 9,900 years of loving them. The rock pigeon was domesticated 10,000 years ago and not only that, we took them freaking everywhere. Pigeons were the first domesticated bird and they were an all-around animal even though they were later bred into more specialised varieties. They were small but had a high feed conversion rate, in other words it didn’t cost a whole lot of money or space to keep and they provided a steady and reliable source of protein as eggs or meat. They home, so you could take them with you and then release them from wherever you were and they’d pretty reliably make their way back. Pigeons are actually among the fastest flyers and they can home over some incredible distances (what fantastic navigators!). They were an incredibly important line of communication for multiple civilisations in human history. You know the first ever Olympics? Pigeons were delivering that news around the Known World at the time. Also, their ability to breed any time of year regardless of temperature or photoperiod? That was us, we did that to them, back when people who couldn’t afford fancier animals could keep a pair or two for meat/eggs. 

Rooftop pigeon keeping isn’t new, it’s been around for centuries and is/was important to a whole variety of cultures. Pigeons live with us in cities because we put them there, we made them into city birds. I get that there are problems with bird droppings and there’s implications for too-large flocks. By all means those are things we should look to control, but you don’t need to hate pigeons with every fibre of your being. You don’t need to despise them or brush them off as stupid (they have been intelligence tested extensively as laboratory animals because guess what other setting they’re pretty well-adapted to? LABORATORIES!) because they aren’t stupid. They’re soft intelligent creatures and I don’t have time to list everything I love about pigeons again. You don’t need to aggressively fight them or have a deep desire to kill them at all. It’s so unnecessary, especially if you realise that the majority of reasons pigeons are so ubiquitous is a direct result of human interference.

We haven’t always hated pigeons though, Darwin’s pigeon chapter in The Origin of Species took so much of the spotlight that publishers at the time wanted him to make the book ONLY about pigeons and to hell with the rest because Victorian’s were obsessed with pigeons (as much as I would enjoy a book solely on pigeons, it’s probably best that he didn’t listen).  My point is, for millenia, we loved pigeons. We loved them so much we took them everywhere with us and shaped them into a bird very well adapted for living alongside us.

It’s only been very recently that we decided we hated them, that we decided to blame them for ruining our cities. The language we use to describe pigeons is pretty awful. But it wasn’t always, and I wish we remembered that. I wish we would stop blaming them for being what we made them, what they are, and spent more time actually tackling the problems our cities face.  

And also pigeon poop was a very valuable fertilizer before we had other options, people would hire guards to stop thieves from stealing their flock’s poop.

We never intended to train her for educational programs. It was a job reserved for our raptors. It was our pigeon who decided she would be a part of what we were doing. One day, when we entered her enclosure to change water and food, she decided to fly to my hand and perch like our raptors do. 

No training, no treats, just the reward of being with us. 

What we hadn’t noticed for the couple months prior was her watching us. This brilliant little bird had been watching us every day as we trained and worked with our raptors. Finally she decided she didn’t want to be left out any longer. She made her place on our hands.

This occurred several times before we finally put her on a glove and brought her into the public. Needless to say, she was right at home. She fluffed up and preened the entire evening while people gawked and asked us why we had a pigeon on one glove and a hawk on another. 

Since then, we’ve added 5 more rescued pigeons to our growing flock. And our pigeon (Tybalt) has become a mainstay ambassador for our programs. Each of our pigeons are incredibly fun to watch and interact with. Pigeons simply don’t get enough love. They are marvelous creatures incredibly suited to life alongside people both physically and mentally. 

Photo by .jocelyn.

They have a complex and fascinating social structure, both within a flock and with other individuals:

Photo by Ingrid Taylar

AND THEY ARE JUST SUPER CUTE, HONESTLY:

Most wild animals all look alike within a species, with TINY, RARE individual variations in terms of rare color morphs, unusually big or small animals, different facial markings and other subtleties. But there is no evolutionary benefit to having species where everyone looks slightly different, and in fact, it’s beneficial for species to be similar and consistent, with a distinctive aesthetic. Especially if you’re trying to blend into the environment - a black wolf is all very well, but it looks positively silly in the summer tundra, where its grey/brown/brindley cousins blend in. A white deer has a great aesthetic - and a very short lifespan in the forest. Distinctive Protagonist looks are rare in the wild, simply because natural selection usually comes down heavily on them.

To humans, most wild animals are visually indistinguishable from each other.

As a result, most wild animals are like

“Oh it’s obvious - you can tell the twins apart because Kara has a big nose.”

Wild animals usually have a pretty consistent aesthetic within their species. It’s important to them!

SO WHAT IS GOING ON WITH PIGEONS?

Look, in one small picture you’ve got a red color morph in the center, several melanistic dark morphs, a few solid black birds, a few variations on the wildtype wing pattern, a PIEBALD, a piebald copper color morph…

Like, there are LAYERS UPON LAYERS of pigeon diversity in most flocks you see. Pure white ones with black wingtips. Solid brown ones with pink iridescent patches. Pale pinkish pigeons.

WHY IS THAT? When other wild animals consider “being slightly fluffier than my brother” to be dangerously distinctive in most circumstances? BECAUSE CITY PIGEONS AREN’T TRULY WILD.

MANY OF THEM (POSSIBLY MOST OR ALL) ARE FERAL MIXES.

THEY WERE ONCE BELOVED PETS, SPECIAL MESSENGERS, EXQUISITE SHOW-WINNERS, AND PRIZED LIVESTOCK.

THEIR PRETTY COLORS WERE DELIBERATELY INTRODUCED BY HUMANS.

AND NOW THEIR HUMANS DON’T LOVE THEM ANY MORE.

See, pigeon fanciers bred (and still breed!) a huge array of pigeons. And the resulting swarms of released/discarded/escaped/phased out “fancy” pigeons stayed around humans. What else were they going to do? They interbred with wildtype pigeons.

Lots of the pigeons you see in public are feral. They’re not wild animals. They’re citizen animals. They’re genetically engineered. And now that’s what “city” pigeons are.

These “wild” horses are all different colors because they’re actually feral. Mustangs in the American West are the descendants of imported European horses - they’re an invasive domestic species that colonized an ecological niche, but they are domestic animals. Their distinctive patterns were deliberately bred by humans. A few generations of running around on the prairie isn’t going to erase that and turn them back into wildtypes. If you catch an adult mustang and train it for a short period, you can ride it and have it do tricks and make it love you. It’s a domestic animal. You can’t really do that with an adult zebra.

No matter how many generations these dogs stay on the street and interbreed with one another, they won’t turn back into wolves. They can’t. They’re deliberately genetically engineered. If you catch one (even after generations of rough living, even as an adult) you can make it stare at your face, care about your body language, and love you.

City pigeons? Well, you don’t have to like them, but they’re in the same boat. They’re tamed animals, bred on purpose, living in a human community. Their very bodies are marked with their former ownership and allegiance; they cannot really return to what they once were; if you caught one, you could make it love you (in a limited pigeon-y way.) They have gone to “the wild,” but not very far from us, and they’d be happy to come back.

So next time you see a flock of city pigeons, spare a moment to note their diversity. The wing patterns. The pied, mottled and brindled. The color types.

All of it was once meant to please you.