Josh Millard builds playful projects, such as Garkov, which generates Garfield strips with Markov chains, and image histogram tricks.
HN cites Garkov as a favorite example of Markov-chain text generation and links his histogram-fitting follow-up as a clever trick.
Markov Chains can be quite amusing when applied to a corpus of similar texts, and often stunningly human-like. I maintain a list of humourous applications: https://github.com/sublimino/awesome-funny-markov
Some favourites:
- Erowid trip reports and tech recruiter emails - https://twitter.com/erowidrecruiter
- Calvin and Markov - Calvin and Hobbes strips reimagined http://joshmillard.com/markov/calvin/
- Generate your future tweets based on the DNA of your existing messages - http://yes.thatcan.be/my/next/tweet/
- Fake headlines created by smashing up real headlines - https://www.headlinesmasher.com/best/all
- The most confusing subreddit (often on the front page) - https://www.reddit.com/r/subredditsimulator
The original Markov-generated content prank: "I Spent an Interesting Evening Recently with a Grain of Salt" https://web.archive.org/web/20011101013348/http://www.sincity.com/penn-n-teller/pcc/shaney.html
And of course (un-amusingly!) - Google's PageRank algorithm is built on Markov Chains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#Damping_factor
n.b. there used to be parodies of Hacker News, but both are down: https://news.ycombniator.com/ and https://lou.wtf/phaker-news
Maybe the language model could use some smoothing? It seems to frequently regurgitate lines from existing comics rather than composing new ones. For example, [1] has "Either mom's cooking dinner, or somebody got sick in the kitchen..." in panel 3, which is almost entirely the 1 June 1986 comic [2] which has "Either mom's cooking dinner, or somebody got sick in the furnace duct."
Cool work nonetheless, and a fun way to re-encounter a favorite.
[1]: http://www.joshmillard.com/markov/calvin/?6570264084521539584
[2]: http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1986/06/01
The derivative I also like, and don't see it here is the markov chain garfield - from back when markov chains were the bee's knees in text generation. The generator is fed by existing garfield comic text, and the generated text is superimposed to a template of existing comics. It might take a few refreshes, but I always manage to amuse myself with the absurdity that it spits out.
https://joshmillard.com/garkov/
Even though this is five years old, I hadn’t seen it before. It’s a very cute trick. The followup by Josh Millard is even better: http://www.joshmillard.com/2007/10/04/retro-histo-making-an-image-fit-your-histogram/
I'll leave this here, since it's loosely on-topic (of Markov chains:) http://www.joshmillard.com/garkov/ — Garfield strips with MC-generated text instead of the original. I've had countless hours of fun with them.
A script for generating images with self-similar histograms (read the first article!) - http://www.joshmillard.com/2007/10/04/retro-histo-making-an-image-fit-your-histogram/