[HN Gopher] Alpha: A translation of Genesis 1
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Alpha: A translation of Genesis 1
From the post: "This was made with the help of a computer program
[word2vec] that tries to express the meaning of any word by an
adjective and a noun pair. Phrases like 'abstract astronomy' for
'space' and 'aquatic archipelagos' for 'islands' were generated by
the program."
Author : npilk
Score : 61 points
Date : 2022-07-27 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com)
| dazzaji wrote:
| I'd love to see this done with the US statutes and regulations.
| rgovostes wrote:
| The author, Doug Summers Stay, explained the method to me a few
| years ago:
|
| ---
|
| The idea is very simple.
|
| You have a target word and a library of possible adjectives and
| nouns that start with the letter a, for example.
|
| You add an extra element to each vector, so they are now 301
| dimensional vectors. For adjectives, you set this to 10, for
| nouns to -10. In the target word, you set this element to zero.
| (You might have to play with the values 10 and -10 a little: they
| should be weighted high enough compared to the other elements
| that getting them right is a necessity rather than just a nice
| thing to have.)
|
| A sparse decomposition function such as LASSO takes in a (1 x 301
| target vector) and a library of n possible vectors stacked up as
| a (n x 301 matrix) and outputs a (n x 1 vector) which shows how
| each of the n possible vectors in the library should be weighted
| in a sum. You tune the sparsity parameter so that it is looking
| for exactly two non-zero weights. So it needs to find two vectors
| that add up as closely as possible to the target vector, and one
| of them must be an adjective and one must be a noun to make it
| work out right.
|
| You perform the sparse decomposition and the non-zero weighted
| elements are the adj. and noun you want. You can run it again
| with those words removed from the dictionary if you want other
| choices.
|
| This is just something I came up with and tested. It's never been
| published anywhere that I'm aware of. You can easily imagine
| variations to find any number of terms with particular properties
| or relationships to each other.
| axlee wrote:
| This is called a tautogram.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram
| npilk wrote:
| And another bit of fun from the comments:
|
| "I used the same tech to make rhyming pairs of words that have a
| particular meaning. Here's a list of some of my favorite results
| from that program:
|
| cowboy: colorado desperado
|
| llama: coat goat
|
| Star_Wars: groovy movie, halloween onscreen, iconic hypersonic,
| cute reboot, droid overjoyed, etc...
|
| friar: yeast priest, barbarian seminarian
|
| spaceship: moon balloon
|
| pillow: head bed
|
| trampoline: elastic gymnastic"
| tgv wrote:
| Nice. I couldn't find a scientific sounding name for the kind of
| alliterative writing, but I did find a book written with similar
| constraints: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_Africa
| axlee wrote:
| This is called a Tautogram.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram
| [deleted]
| shever73 wrote:
| The voice in my head as I read it is Brother Maynard from Monty
| Python and the Holy Grail. Especially the "anchovies and
| anenomes" bit.
| zuminator wrote:
| From the comments, someone created an "S" version. [0]
|
| Also this exercise reminds me of How The World Was Saved (Jak
| Ocalal Swiat)[1][2]
|
| [0]
| http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.htm...
|
| [1] https://english.lem.pl/works/novels/the-cyberiad/146-how-
| the...
|
| [2] (first story)
| http://lib.mlm.ru/pl_stanislaw_lem_cyberiada.htm
| nathell wrote:
| Reminds me of Stanislaw Baranczak's paraphrase of Hamlet's
| soliloquy where every word on the first line starts with A, on
| the second with B, etc. Unfortunately, I'm afraid you need to
| understand Polish fluently to appreciate this:
|
| https://czytankianki.blogspot.com/2012/05/przekad-alternatyw...
| flobosg wrote:
| (2017)
|
| If you liked it, check out the work of Christian Bok, in
| particular "Eunoia".
| schoen wrote:
| I was inspired last year to do an equivalent with B:
| https://godexperiment.org/beginnings-an-alliterative-rewrite...
| ("Blessed Being began by building blue bowl, bottom base...").
| (That's not my own site where it's posted, it's my friend
| Jeremiah's site.)
|
| I was also inspired by this S version:
| https://calvinballing.github.io/saga/ ("So started saga: Supreme
| sentience shaped skies, secular sphere...").
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(page generated 2022-07-27 23:00 UTC)