
Training a neural net to generate British placenames - triplesec
https://medium.com/@hondanhon/i-trained-a-neural-net-to-generate-british-placenames-9460e907e4e9
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smcl
There's a subset of Weird Twitter people from the USA who riff on weird UK
placenames and sayings every now and then. I frequently have to remind myself
how odd they must sound to an outsider.

@arr and @livestock put together the "Wobbingpool Police Incident Report" on
Something Awful a while back which is a nice example:
[http://www.somethingawful.com/news/wobbingpool-police-
report...](http://www.somethingawful.com/news/wobbingpool-police-report/)

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pacaro
If you're not British or a serious Anglophile it can be hard to believe that
Nempnett Thrubwell or Newton Poppleford are real places.

We used to drive to Portishead to listen to Portishead.

~~~
QAPereo
Years ago, I heard what I thought was the name of a play, "Western Super
Mayor" was opening in the UK. A bit of checking and it turned out that it's
the town of, Weston-super-Mare; sort of a Latinized version of "Whatevertown-
upon-Rivername."

I'm pretty sure that if you said, "Weston-super-Mare" to a random collection
of Americans, virtually none of them would even recognize what you were
saying.

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dri_ft
> "Whatevertown-upon-Rivername." "Upon-sea", actually, but yes.

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QAPereo
Oh they're seas?! I always (wrongly I guess) assumed that they were all
rivers, like Tine, Avon, that kind of thing.

~~~
jwdunne
No that's right. Parent meant "Weston super mare" literally means "Weston upon
sea", not that Upon is reserved for seas.

~~~
QAPereo
Oh, I'm a goober, thanks for the explanation.

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jwdunne
Eeesh that's a lot of Stoke.

Place names in Britain are extremely arbitrary and I wonder how this impacts.
Some of these don't feel quite "right".

Here's an interesting story that explains my thinking:

There's an area of Salford called Irlams o'th Height. This used to be called
the Height as it was elevated over the Irwell.

There was a family in the 18th century who owned a pub on the Height. This was
the Irlam family.

The pub, officially the Park Horse, was locally known as "Irlam's". It was
literally "Irlam's on the Height".

As the area grew, especially during the industrial revolution, the entire area
was just called "Irlam's on the Height". This has continued to this day -
nobody really questions it.

There's also an area in Salford called Irlam. This is on the opposite side of
Salford and has nothing to do with Irlam's pub (perhaps except that may be
where the family name originated). The area was called Irwellham - a hamlet on
the river Irwell.

Salford, to finish, I think is naturally due to a ford. Probably a ford in one
of the rivers, perhaps the Irwell again, since Salford emcompassed much of
what is now Greater Manchester.

Long winded story out of the way, to generate British sounding names, take
local natural landmarks/typically British surnames and suffix with "ham",
"ton", "chester". Must warn - many will probably exist!

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nerdponx
Imagine some kind of AI that generates place names by simulating entire
histories, Dwarf Fortress style.

~~~
dTal
Seems to me you'd have a far more interesting program than a mere place name
generator.

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grabcocque
There's a significant subset of Americans for whom in their mind Britain looks
a lot like Narnia. Frankly the preponderance of cutesy Saxon village names
that look and sound a lot like these are part of the reason.

That and the existence of people like Jacob Rees-Mogg.

~~~
QAPereo
It's a little more sinister when you realize how much money, land, and power
rests on those frilly, fanciful notions. It's not just Americans, but plenty
of British people who fall for the illusion to some degree, much as many
Americans buy into "Exceptionalism" or some flavor of nationalism.

Often the debate ends up centered around the monarchy, and then dies a quiet
death when the turkeys in the HoL fail to support the notion of Thanksgiving.

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adamcharnock
This reminds me of a tremendously unhelpful idea that keeps circling my brain:
A bot that trains a neural net using code comments from a specific GitHub
project. The bot then replaces all the comments in the project with those
produced by the neural net, then sends in a pull request.

You could also use different training data, perhaps mix in some Mills & Boon.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Bonus points if it only adds comments to previously un-commented sections,
especially ones that look complicated.

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nemoniac
These are clearly English place names and bear no relation to the rest of
Britain.

~~~
irremediable
There are several that are clearly Welsh. Possibly a couple that sound
Scottish, though that's tricky to tell without confirmation bias...

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arethuza
You get a few Welsh sounding place names in Scotland that are actually from
the Old Brythonic/Ancient British that was the forerunner of Welsh - Penicuik
(Pen Y Cog) outside Edinburgh being one.

I don't see anything on the list that looks Gaelic, Norse or the old weird
Pictish names...

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curiouser2
I did this with a list of 10,000 cannabis strain names scraped from a seed
database, have had results running on a twitter bot:
[https://twitter.com/high_learning_](https://twitter.com/high_learning_)

my favorites so far: 'Grape Meth', 'Bitch Kush', 'Critical Burple', 'Space
Hell'

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princeb
Batchington Crunnerton

sounds like you found an actor

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zinckiwi
Lost it at "Fuckley."

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oceanswave
For me it was Fapton

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mhh__
My connection is too poor to actually read the article: Can it generate welsh
(Compound? Not sure) names like the classic
"llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch"

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dzhiurgis
Someone with no life could scale this out to all countries (plus generate
legit street names and person names).

You'd get an universal fake-address-generator to rule them all.

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mhh__
Dull - twinned with Boring, Oregon - can be found in scotland.

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505
On inspection of the examples, perhaps even Dickensian.

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wikiwawa
Not to be a downer but put this one under the category of "it's not AI if a
character based ngram model can do it".

But fun regardless of the hype-y AI title.

~~~
msla
This not only has a name, it has a Wikipedia article:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect)

> As soon as AI successfully solves a problem, the problem is no longer a part
> of AI.

snip

> Douglas Hofstadter expresses the AI effect concisely by quoting Tesler's
> Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

