Using Mathematica to generate Web 2.0 company names

http://collison.ie/blog/2009/04/using-mathematica-to-generate-web-20-company-names

by mqt • 17 years ago

26 4 17 years ago

This is a nice idea, but I was hoping for a big text dump of names I could look at. Maybe you could turn this into a web app.

barrkel• 17 years ago

I don't know Mathematica, so I can't quite tell exactly what algorithm is being used in Patrick's code, but I do know that Markov chains are a useful way of generating similar names and are easy to program in common languages. (Patrick may be using Markov chaining - I see a RandomChoice from CharFreqs.)

Basically, analyze a word corpus and create frequencies for letter pairs, considering word start and end as letters for convenience. Then, starting with a word start, choose letters randomly based on the frequency of the pairs where the first letter in the pair is the last letter in your current word. Continue until a word end is chosen.

Building frequencies using letter triplets rather than letter pairs can get better results, where pairs may choose unlikely match-ups such as "cth", taking e.g. a"ct" as common, and "th"e as common. Longer tuples can be chosen but a slight adjustment of word start and end strategy is needed.

abecedarius• 17 years ago

I don't know Mathematica either, but here's a Markov-model hack as barrkel suggested: http://github.com/darius/languagetoys/blob/505309d5900ac49c6...

appleJ• 17 years ago

iCantThinkOfBetterName

... (iPhone app)

Using Mathematica to generate Web 2.0 company names

Related Stories