Teaching a computer to talk

Regenerating plausible text isn't as easy as it might look. Here's a first attempt, using uncurated phrases and a random number generator.

One of the great things about this job is my work a bit of a work I am trying to life day I am going to before would otherwise not have you. That much, at least, is obvious.

Not very impressive, eh? So I cleaned up a few terms, and tried again:

It occurred to me yesterday that ifmy in the middle ofwork to be in thework don't always realise they have to listen to melife I am going today the rest of thebefore the rest of the you.

Not there yet. I fiddled slightly more, and now:

It occurred to me yesterday that ifmy I don't know ifwork belief is that it would have been really work the old man wholife the end of theday 0before the rest of the you. 0

Now comes the tiresome side of things: going back and looking at all the phrases I've got, and making sure I tie them together tidily, without accidentally falling foul of garden-path sentences. Here's the fruit of another hour's labour:

I'm not mentally ill. And even if I was, would this seem so strange: my pay from writing two series of that sitcom means not having to worry about if I am going to work , which makes sense, until you realise that's just the plot of last night's episode of 'The Simpsons'. Which makes me think that the first . It wouldn't be so bad if my girlfriend and and a couple of my I was going to man a bit of a show I didn't want to man . Thanks for paying attention.

Well, getting closer...

Scrabble

I delivered a crushing defeat to my girlfriend at Scrabble this evening. 283 beats 281 - boo ya!

Mischief with words

I was reading a review of Sherlock Holmes that suggested that it telescoped together fifty years of english slang into one film, because the yoof of today can't distinguish Victorian speech vs Edwardian vs the Swinging Sixties, and also that films of yesteryear often look odd to us now because only one example will survive. Roger Moore running down the street like he has a broomstick up his rear end may seem daft to us now, but when Live And Let Die was released, there were ... plenty of films with a well-preserved chap from Streatham running badly?

It's a hard life

I felt exhausted today - perhaps it was all that going to bed late - although midnight is hardly a late time to get to bed on.  Today passed interminably, but all too soon we were leaving the office and heading for Lan Kwai Fong.