Re: Random Name Generator
- From: narius.varigor@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2008 23:17:23 -0700 (PDT)
On Jun 30, 3:40 pm, Jeff Lait <torespondisfut...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jun 30, 12:36 pm, Jakub Debski <debski.ja...@xxxxx> wrote:
I wanted a random name generator for the player, so decided to write a
new one. It uses a very simple finite state machine to select between
individual letters in a fashion that creates pronouncable player
names. I look forward to people's comments/improvements.
A few years ago we had discussion on that topic with nice Markov chains
based implementation. Why to reinvent the wheel? :)
http://tinyurl.com/4x996x
Thank you for the link. I rejected a markov chain approach as I
wanted a very wide list of available names not strongly biased by some
dictionary. In some ways, you can consider this to be a markov chain
with an implicit transition table.
The other problem I have with a letter-based markov generator is that
it is hard to add enough history to ensure you get valid pronouncable
names (ie, not too many consonants in a row) without resulting in a
degenerate generator that barely deviates from your sample set.
The last post in that discussion addresses this by layering an
additional restriction, essentially prohibiting triple consonants. An
issue I have with that is not all double consonants are necessarily
easy to pronounce - thus my inspiration from phonemes to classify the
consonants by pronounciation to force them to chain in the proper
fashion and return to a vowel swiftly enough.
I do like the idea of digging down to the phonemene level to
concentrate on building names, my main concern is that the orthography
you impose on your phonemes will likely have more effect on the names
than the actual phonemes you pick. ej vs edge is an excellent example
- my perfect name generator would produce both those options rather
than only one of them.
--
Jeff Lait
(POWDER:http://www.zincland.com/powder)
I had success using markov chains following transition between letter
pairs, rather than single letters. This solved most of the issues with
triple+ letters. You're spot on with needing a fairly large data set
for the short names.
With my name generators I extract the transition tables from name
lists of different languages. It works well.
--
Elsairon
.
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