The neural network writes the episode list for next season’s Dr. Who

I’ve trained this open-source neural network framework on a variety of datasets, including recipes, Pokemon, knock-knock jokes, pick up lines, and D&D spells.



Now I give you: training a neural network on the complete list of Dr. Who episodes. (Big shout-out of thanks to blog readers Anya and Dan, who provided the dataset!)



The input dataset was simply the list of episodes, with no extra information given to the network - it has no idea even if this is English, or words, or a list rather than a paragraph or code.

Pretty much immediately, however, it figures out that “The” is important, as are the letter combinations “Do” and “Da”. The following is output from a very early generation, with the “temperature” (think “daringness”) variable turned to a very safe setting:

The Dont

The Dant

The Dant

The The Dant

The The Dont

If increase the temperature, forcing it to be more daring, it will try other letter combinations, but won’t give up on using “the”. Sometimes it’ll pile on a whole cascade of “the”s, in a fit of either panic or pique.

The Dinn

The Sons

The Ardeao

The Areir

The Wed on the The The Ans

Then, it finally learns to spell “Dalek” and never looks back.

Safe setting: (Daleks. Stick with the Daleks.) The Sires of the Daleks

The Argass of the Daleks

The Arges of the Daleks

The Wire of the Daleks

The Argoss of the Daleks

The Argass of the Daleks

The Argas of the Daleks

The Daleks of the Daleks

Adventurous setting: (Nonsense words and Daleks)



The Wirs of the Arooss of the Daleks

The Pas of the Amse

The Aaression Ware

The Amios of the Lale

The Fist of the Daad

The Girg Bans

In later generations, it has learned the tiny input set by heart, and on the safe setting is able to reproduce the actual episodes word-for-word, in order. On the adventurous temperature setting, I’m able to force the neural network to make spelling mistakes, and its attempts to move back toward some spot in the original list make for some interesting new episodes.

I give you: Dr. Who episodes produced by a rather annoyed neural network.