From: Ken Bloom <kbloom@...>
Date: 2008-04-11T09:10:08+09:00
Subject: Re: Random name generator!

On Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:40:17 -0500, Dss Jss wrote:

> Hello to all;
> 
> I'm testing out different ways to output randomly generated names. I've
> toyed with some basic algorithms but recently I've become hooked on the
> idea of using a Markov chain in the process to generate names based on a
> text file. Below is a link to my first effort - I won't even begin to
> start on what a catastrophe it is and I don't expect you to understand
> it:
> 
> http://pastie.textmate.org/178820
> 
> It's hideous. I'm never going near it again. It basically looks at each
> line of a text file and throws the adjacent letter pairings into a big
> hash with probability weightings, moves through the probability hash
> coughing out likely letter results based on the previous entry. I think
> the term for it is "first-order Markov chain".
> 
> What I'd like to see if anyone has any suggestions, or more importantly
> examples of how this should be done? I'm fairly certain there are more
> elegant ways about doing this. Thanks.

http://rubyquiz.com/quiz74.html

The solutions are for word markov chains, but you could easily adapt any 
of them for letter markov chains.

--Ken

-- 
Ken (Chanoch) Bloom. PhD candidate. Linguistic Cognition Laboratory.
Department of Computer Science. Illinois Institute of Technology.
http://www.iit.edu/~kbloom1/