How To Write A Name Generator (In Ruby)
How To Write A Name Generator (In Ruby)
by Alan Skorkin on July 19, 2009
http://www.blogadilla.com/2008/05/11/the-blogadilla-swedish-furniture-name-generator/
I love reading fantasy, I’ve even written about some of my favourite fantasy series on this blog. One of the things that I have always found interesting about fantasy literature (besides unworkable economies and unsustainable population densities – I tend to over-analyse when I read :)) was how they come up with the names for all the characters. Large fantasy series often contain hundreds of characters – that’s a lot of names. This line of though naturally led me to think of what I would do if I ever needed to make up a bunch of names and being the software developer that I am the answer was naturally – get my computer to make up the names for me.
If you do a search around the web for name generators you get quite a few results, unfortunately most of those don’t tell you how they do what they do and even that is besides the point since I wasn’t really happy with the results that most of these name generators produce. Either the results are way too random (how about 6 consonants in a row) or they are not random enough with clear traces of human intervention (i.e. choosing from a list of pre-made names). Then I found Chris Pounds excellent name generator page. One of the things that he has on this page is his language confluxer (lc) script so for my first attempt at writing a name generator I decided to basically take his script and clean it up a little bit. There were two reasons for this:
* he uses a pretty clever algorithm for his name generator, it is completely data driven and is therefore able to avoid the 6 consonants/vowels in a row issue while producing output that sounds similar to the data it is based on
* it was a yucky Perl script and nobody wants to work with that (except Perl programmers), so I felt it was my duty to make it a little bit nicer and since I’ve been playing around with Ruby lately, well you get the picture 🙂
The Name Generator Algorithm
As I said the script is completely data driven in that it takes a list of words (names in our case) as input and uses these to produce a bunch of randomised names that hopefully sound similar to the original input. It does the following:
* produces a list of starting letter pairs from the input data (all our names will start with one of these pairs)
* produces a map of which letters can follow which other letters based on the input data
* generates words/names by randomly selecting a starting pair and then appending to the word by randomly choosing a letter from the map based on what the last letter in our new word currently is
* this continues until the word length falls into a particular range (this range is hard-coded in the script)
There are a few more little twists that make this whole thing function but that is the essence of the algorithm.
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