My Non-Art Life

One of my favorite things to do with machine learning algorithms is to get them to name things. Give a neural network (a type of machine learning algorithm) enough examples, and it will do an often decent (sometimes howlingly bad) imitation of their letter combinations and patterns, all without the slightest clue what any of it means. I’ve used neural networks to name craft beers, cats, paint colors, pubs, and even guinea pigs.

Here, I trained two neural networks, char-rnn and textgenrnn, on a set of 24,548 boat names, courtesy of Bradley Peterson and a sailor from San Francisco.

Behold the name of your next boat (or next self-aware starship?)

First, the decent/plausible ones:

Sky-Shark Sun Princess Windsprite Sandy Bear Catchwind Flowing Wind Windshark Wave Bard Sea Rainbow Windshare Second Sun The Windmower Sea Bug Miss Salty Bully Of The Water

And for the somewhat more eccentric sea captain:

Bear Storm Slow Shark Hugs Sea Hog First Ramen Sun Of Bear Little Boot Ship The Trick Wart Day Of The Grover Running A Goose Shadow Again Ken Dream Princess Cracking Dusting Hare String Shark Jelly Gall Fumper Huggy Tail Bear Goose Midnight Rat Pea Fury Song Fish Of The Dog Quiet Leg Cookie Sea Back Shark Salty Lick Wolfing Sun Nature Charging Lover

I’m kind of fond of the ones that really do sound like someone trained an AI to write them:

Nice Boat What Day Saily Sea Blue Of The Wind Merry Biggles The Fun Big Ditty Sun In The Sun Stinker Delusions The Salt, How Are Sons Otto Smells The Bug Wolfs ! Trivial Pockets Wands Off! It…. Holeygum Arch & Navel Spocked

These are available at a discounted rate:

Stinky Day Silent Wind Snot Runner The Shanky Wind Bad Surfer Lick Musty Fin Princesside Maolly Fart Putty Mom Just Ship Aquamock Stinkbarr Drifting Furdy Some Dog The Liver Silent Rock Spanking Winds Sand Plow

I am always amazed by all the corners of life that have their own naming conventions. What makes a name sound like an heirloom apple, or a cookie, or a Pokemon?

Here’s one I had never thought much about: the names of fireworks. Bruce Preston spends the New Year in the Netherlands where fireworks are a big deal. He collected the names of over 3,000 fireworks from vuurwerkbieb.nl, ranging from “Important Pyro Show” to “Super 8 Cake Blue Star” to “Kinder Pakket Groot XXL” (some of the names are in Dutch, which just made it more interesting).

Now the reason people send me datasets like this is because I like to give them to algorithms called neural networks, which can learn to imitate the words they see. Without any direction from me, and without any prior knowledge of the words and what they mean (or even that they ARE words; they might be knitting patterns), the neural network (here, textgenrnn) produces its best imitation.

In this case, its best imitation of fireworks sounds a lot like, well, an artificial intelligence trying to imitate fireworks names.

Happiness Rockets Gold Mini wow Flaming Thundersplont Box Crackling Shapes Bright Blue Stoppers Soundd Box Red flashing cake Machine Blinking Display Code Rumble Smile Rockets Extreme maxied whistling None Star Thunder Excellent Rain What Crackling 16 Silver Pirate Counters

Some of the imitations are particularly poor. Or awesome, depending on how you look at it.

Pronk XL B2B Torch All-Dang Shark Whistler 1 Darner Box  Far Exploring Palm Black Moo Sheeperstrike Senior Fountain Just Timmy Hurricane Said Bang Shaming Bulls Big Doo Cake Spent on the Bun Stragfalmed

And some of its fireworks sound more like they’re from the post-human era where machines dimly remember what humans were like, and celebrate them with commemorative explosions.

Medium mushing box Green Event Shorts I just looked Definite Box Into Eggs Oh Fountain Event Badger One Assortiment Sneaking Veet Box 3 Black Hall is released Golden Strink is 4x Original Cat Pix Budget 2 Boom