Neural networks are a type of computer program that imitate the way humans learn. If you give them a long list of examples of anything – paint colors, Broadway musicals, cat names, and even guinea pig names – they’ll teach themselves how to generate similar examples.
Last week, I tried giving a neural network a list of Star Wars planets and sure enough, it was soon producing plausible planets that (mostly) would have passed without comment as part of the Star Wars universe.
Now, I try the same thing with Star Wars character names, thanks to another list from blog reader Chris Jones. It turns out that it works pretty well.
Garan Sande Seran Bant Bri Dalrhon Joff Bala Bun Bana Betti Cantha Boen Cemenan Shilen Carton Doylan Wannaar Jo Grailis Greki Ves Lar-V Male Rob-V Rachal Slin Sran Baran Saran Rantar Tanter Mana Kane Captain Kreet
You’ll notice there’s a “captain” at the end of the list… the neural network would occasionally produce captains and commanders and admirals, but it’s rare that it would spell them correctly. This is because I was using some pretty aggressive dropout settings to prevent the neural network from memorizing entire names from the tiny input dataset. I was essentially forcing it to learn to function with only a small fraction of its neurons working at a time, so it had to stick to very simple rules that could be implemented with just a neuron or two. The upside: the neural network began to work with short Star Wars-y letter combinations rather than entire words. The downside: lots of “Cammanders” and “Anmirals”.
Inquisisor: Sarth Bertor Grand Andiral Chenge Shelte Anmiral Carn Daralo Admira Sanos Anmeral Teeran Salan Cammander Copta Carmander Sorod Comtander Jan Ganaral Danter
Some of the other names were also less than successful, but that’s not the neural network’s fault. It only knows about the words on its own list, not the rest of the English language. If a word sequence is pronounceable according to its rules, it’s perfectly valid as far as it knows.
Jan Moron Reme Mold Ban Sand Mo-Da Cat Dars Werdo Math Bins Mad Danran Santa Salane Bun Mans Bare Center Granter Matter Broth
But my favorite part was the Sith lords.
There were enough Darths in the list that at the very lowest-creativity settings, everyone was a Sith lord. Here are some of my favorites:
Darth Teen Darth Tannin Darth Ben Darth Toes Darth Teena Darth Darth Dorth Darth Darth Mon Darth Man Darth Darth Sans Darth Band Darth Mall Darth Tall Grand Moff Darth Salt
I would like to see the costumes for some of these.
Want more Darths? Sign up here and I’ll email you an 8-page pdf of output straight from the neural network.
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