“Yup, take the Pendoil bridge just past Sad Cahue Village, and you’ll be up ta’ Ponkey before ya know it!”

Y’all, we’ve entered a computing epoch when AI is available to us at nearly the level of commodity entertainment. Take this experiment in generative British placenames by Dan Hon; his workflow is 7 goddamn steps to use technology only the likes of Alan Turing could have dreamed up, until a few years ago.

Dan used a multi-layer recurrent neural net to come up with imaginary locales like “Buchraston-on-Ter-Sey”, so I thought I give it a shot and see what a complex algorithm could do with a state that includes “Ira”, “Lympus”, and “Satan’s Kingdom” IRL. Here are the choicest results of the several thousand I generated; they look more Welsh than I would have expected:

Cellen Boneyboas

Macih Pond

Pendoil

Ralas Port

ClintCtow

Wi

Wont

Cissham Bond

Whortdlay Pond

Sad Cahue

Coal Bontewlu Porn

Bent Pond

Hicton

Mash dank Mount

Goryhy Pond

Ha

Dondslon

Dorits Wat Poon

Cold Bamronr

Wot Ponde

Claylelon

Golen

Cllen Boneyboas

Rut anvill

Ponk

Chomtax Bastarr

Lentrenston

Wershrok Modanton

Bonten Poad

Ponkey

Wasdesh

Vontfalilina

Kart Pond

Poon Welton

Hate Zonord

Cowrelu

Mu

Now, these don’t exactly meet my not-totally-formulated standard for “Vermontyness”, but that’s the nature of machine learning in this case: it’s about figuring out the question using a series of answers. And to be fair, Vermont’s placenames aren’t that distinct (at least by the standards of the Northeastern U.S.): mostly English place and family names, with a very small smattering of French and Abenaki. Also, the fact that both “Ponk” and “Ponkey” show up here tells me that my training set might be a tad small — only ~2000 placenames went into the model — but overall this is good fun.

Many thanks to Justin Johnson (whose work I’ve benefitted from before) and Cristian Baldi for making such accessible tools in the brave new world of machine learning.

Try it out yourselves: here’s a docker image with everything you need!