Blue Boulders Problem 1: More rock climbing routes via neural network

The other day I discovered that neural networks can learn to name rock climbing routes, when I trained one to generate new names for routes in Boulder and Joshua Tree. This week, I learned that they can name rock climbing routes in several languages at once.

UK Climbing saw these results and, to help train an even more capable neural network, sent me their entire database - all 427,000 names. These were the names of climbing routes from all around the world, in dozens of languages, names from the traditional (Muscle Crack, The Gizzard, Problem 21) to the more fanciful (Gandalf’s Groove Direct, Owl and Primroses).

First, for the cleanest dataset possible, I extracted the countries that have mostly english-language route names (about 155k names once I removed duplicates and numbered routes), and the neural net quickly learned to produce one plausible route after another. You might be able to slip this into a casual account of your last climbing trip, and have others nod in vague recognition. “Ah, yes, the Folly Cloud. Climbed that one last week before breakfast.”

The Stuff

Rocket Sheep

Ramp of Lies

Strangershine

Candy Storm

The Dog Sand

Holy Mess

Left Hand Monster

The Scratching One

The Angel’s Crack

Suckstone Gully

The Folly Cloud

Burning Doll

Silver Milk

The Cat Bear

Block of Fred

The Limber

Element’s Chimney

The Space Special

Bear Box

Smashworm

The Peacher

The Sun Mouse

The Bobble Block

The Rib (Stinkley)

Cry Problem 15

Scary Boulder Start

Solo Gallow Wall (STEXXY

The Sole and Elephant

Crag and Be Bloody

Midge Face

Seven Belly

Wine for the Great Free Man

However, I’m happy to report that some of the names were indeed even weirder than your typical route name.

You’re Not Andrew

Master In Your Tea

Bean on the Pocket

Seven Dry Have Ship

Mantlet Butt’s Locket

No Rocks Egg

In Arms if the Lords

Parking Store Substance

Over a Wall No Mover

The Very Seven Steps

Robin Time and The Sheep

Captain Purple and Darkness

The Sun Tin’s Not Your Winds

Next, I trained the neural net on the entire database, just to see what it would make of the non-English names. It definitely struggled more this time - it reported much lower confidence in its results. But it did manage to become multilingual, generating names that were identifiably French, Spanish, or German (these were the most common languages other than English in the dataset, so these were mostly what it learned). Even if many of them didn’t make much sense.



La Grimper - French: The climb

Cascade de l'ange - French: Cascade of the angels

De l'angle de la surplomb - French: From the angle of the overhang

Steines Schwein - German: Stone’s pig

Sin Homble - Spanish: Without Homble

El Pollute - Spanish: The Pollute

Rapute de la vine - Romanian: Rapping of the coming

Danse ton de Barre - French: Dance tone of bar

Sometimes it did end up mixing up the languages, although not as often as I had expected. Maybe it was doing it much more with languages I was less familiar with, and I couldn’t tell.

El Pantes du Petit

La Desire del pierra

Le Chins de Constant (Standing Pub)

El Lope du Pante

Sans Inside Droit

Via de la finger

Les l'Appolena

Placa de Carpet

The Schlang

Its brainpower was spread a bit thin, trying to remember rules for generating multiple languages at once. Unlike human brains, it definitely wasn’t built for compartmentalizing multiple languages. This struggle had an effect on the quality of its English names, which actually I rather like.

Boulder 1, Problem the Gorge

Very Up

Fred birthday

Red 1

Blue Boulders Problem 1

No we and Cheese

The Spooning

Cat of the Shallow

Serpent Mars

End Cow

Escapes of the Beach Brother

The Corner Stand of The Little Heart

There’s a whole category of names that I ended up not including in this blog post, although if you’re familiar with climbing route names you’ll recognize these as totally in the spirit of the originals. You can read them at UK Climbing, whose audience does not include small children, or you can read them (plus a few more bonus names) by entering your email here.