Yahoo Finance AI is trained to generate incredibly British place names
From Pratt's Bottom to Westward Ho!, Britain is known for its quaint and unusual place names, but now there is an artificial intelligence program that can generate even more.
US programmer Dan Hon announced a new list of place names on Twitter, created through a program that analysed thousands of British towns and villages and was trained to generate new ones at random.
The bot has come up with more than 4,500 names, many of which would not look out of place on a drive through rural England.
Here’s some of my favourites:
* Wascood Woot’s Corner
* Filton-on’s Forton
* Top-Road Quinting
* Grinachard St Ringley— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) July 19, 2017
There are already plenty of rude and unusual British place names, from the village of Pity Me in County Durham to Great Snoring in Norfolk. Hon's list adds more, from Bapnington-on-Faith to Nockpop.
Even more!
* Farton Green Pear End
* Brotters Common
* Ouch
* Higher Ridgerton
* Fottington— Dan Hon (@hondanhon) July 19, 2017
In a post on Medium, Hon said he took a list of British place names, analysed them a with a neural network, a computer system modeled on the way a human brain learns, and used it to generate an list of new and bizarre places.
The program was partly inspired by another AI program that was used to name thousands of new paint colours using their RGB (red, green and blue) colour values.
While there are many of important uses of AI, programmers have demonstrated several unusual cases of machine learning.
A Google AI program was trained to read romantic and erotic novels in an effort to teach it to creat text with a conversational tone. The AI read more than 2,865 romantic novels to talk colloquially and use colourful language.
Infamously, last year Microsoft launched a Twitter chatbot that would learn the natural language of users it interacted with. While it was designed to talk like a teenage girl, the bot ultimately tweeted a series of racist and sexist posts before it was shut down.
