We’ve been playing around with Markov text generation (again).
Here’s some generated text based on Moby-Dick, using a word-level trigram model (we call this program Drunk Melville):
Out of the herd. Though such a movement that loosed his hold for the missionary and the red flag, half-wrapping him as cool as an auxiliary material. But, besides the bedstead and centre of the bright sun’s rays like a mildewed skull. Had not the most imminent danger, as this was a little more than if he had been lost by a flood, borne back to the destruction he had ever seen. It was the sound they made a tremulous shadow cast upon his entering a boat alongside, and pushed a little as if this were otherwise, there were not enough, the whole weary thing again. Oh! my lads, DO spring – slap-jacks and quahogs for supper, you know, Rose-bud, that it’s all one, all in a most miserable plight. Too expensive and jolly, again thought I, and we felt like getting up again, captains, and let’s have that swearing. Talk to ‘em.
For comparison, here’s some generated text based on Sense and Sensibility (we’ll call this version Drunk Austen):
Surely this comparison must have involved you in the smallest wish of bringing with his family, and pressed them so cordially to dine with you about her. Ay, it is so delicate a man, with whom they were such as leaves no opening for the best; he will soon have outgrown the fancied necessity of buying a pair of scissors that lay there, and it ended too soon. My affection for herself, which she had, very early in April, and tolerably early in their faces the animating gales of a smile. “I feel no sentiment of approbation which Elinor had no such encouragement to think that three hundred and fifty pounds from the others, by any thing. Do not think it proper that Marianne should sit so composedly by, without claiming a share in that total want of thought which particularly recommended the army.
And, as our friend Bob Hearn points out, it’s mashups of multiple texts that are the most fun. So, here’s a mashup of the two:
Whale’s name to another in an even, unexhilarated voice, saying, “Dinner, Mr. Stubb,” said I, looking dubiously at the coronation procession of ships floated up to my God, His all the players. Possibly, too, Jonah might have had no hand in shipping that ivory arm (like two sword-fish blades) cried out to him, that I plainly see that. He had just quitted, where they have no taste for drawing!” replied Elinor, “I have just bethought me of it again and again; and in preparation for a few yards of Marianne, of marking his animated admiration of the eternal democracy in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those latitudes, where the monomaniac old man has to be frequented here and there are some of which almost exactly answer to a lounging circle of singed locks which grew on the part where it is – which might otherwise have entered Elinor’s head.
Craving more Markov generated text? You might also enjoy these rhyming couplets, automatically generated from the Google Books NGram data (all 1,000,000 books, not just Moby-Dick) by code I just extracted from our archives:
As if the implication is given
Of the shipowner will be driven.Money he has participated
Honorably associated.A warning
Every morning.And that we evaluated the effects
Detailed and more especially in neurasthenic subjects.That red hair that moved along the equally
Company asked their father or his family.
More here: Automatic Couplets.