Neural networks and fantasy titles, part 1

[telophase]

I created a list of 5000 fantasy titles from several sources including Goodreads, Wikipedia, and Internet Speculative Fiction Database and fed it into the neural network.

I've had to play with it a bit because a lot of the non-nonsense titles it generates end up being actual titles. To try to get away from that, for the next two runs trhough the dataset I shortened the number of letters it should learn from--it basically looks at letters that occur next to each other a lot to form words--and told it to only look at the letters that come *before* the target letter, not both before and after.

Sample output:


I am completely sure some of the realistic-sounding ones are actually existing titles. I am equally sure that the AI often likes to mix and match real titles with real series names.

Try 1:

Shattered Fate
The Le
llyn of Stralm
Kingdom of Ash Gamma
Rise of the Skull Chronicles, #1)
Graning Hall
Gray Moon
The Swords of Lankhmar (Feeeld, #1)
Fire (Strangemeather, #4)
The Light Princess (The Dark Tower #4.5)

Try 2:

The House of the Dark Tower (The Lord of the Ristany of the Story
The Shadow of the Shadows
The Great Stories
The Game of Magic
The World of the Lost of the Secrets of the Black
The Shadow of the Story
The Book of the Shadows of the Realms
The Gods of Cons
The Shadow of The Magic
Proge of the Elvess
The Black Company (Gormenghast, #2)
The Shadow of the Stars (Study, #2)
The Emperor's Shadow (The Haggory The History of the Morrai (The History of Middle-earth #1)
The Dark Tower (The Broken Empire, #1)
A Clash of the Changer (The Horry Potter, #1)
The Black Company (The Shadow Campaigns, #2)
The Story of the Heart of the Tower of the Sun and the Five Gods, #1)
The Books of the World's Court
The Emperor's Blood (Harry Potter, #3)
Brazing the World (Beastle Trilogy, #2)

Try 3:

rld (War Princess Tale
The Dragon Campaign
The Scarlet Potter and the Champur (The Dreaming Advenge
The War of the Sea of Light and The War of the Lion (The Dresden Files, #5)
Death Magic
Blood Prince
Blood and Bell
Cold Dragon
The Marked Pirg (The Dark is Rising, #2)
Inkholt of the Sky Court of Fire (Chaos Walkin
Shadow Castle
Master Kisses
Pelic's War
Pirate (Viptal, #2)
Red Kiss and Sullt (Discworld, #36; Tith His Dragon
Angel of the Bass
Cold Dream: Books 1-5
The Last Enchanter (Load in Lill, #1)
Amber and Ashes
Harry Potter and the Heart and the Lost Colonian
The Shadow of What Was at the Moon (Twilight, #2)
The Last Voyage to the Eight Eye of Tales
Cold's Collection (Fireforest, #1)
Spronked Storm
Smoke of Pears (Book of One, #1)
The Six of the Darkness (The Black Jewels trilogy
The Bone Doon's Terror Down



Full results, with the settings I used, if you're interested:

Try 1: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t5npc6AIRio8FhxVZFUFBfDPADaP7lfOJKlRHJHwaPU/edit?usp=sharing

Try 2: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R56AB2-qZZet_JXd2SOn3UxSe3fHmLgdIInsoDLKSJQ/edit?usp=sharing

Try 3: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14RHF1PegyEXr1aRsoo4GyoX1Xq-9qbJN-t5H9hUBVdo/edit?usp=sharing

I also spent part of the afternoon cleaning up the data list and removing everything that I recognized as being science fiction, urban fantasy, or containing stuff I just didn't want in there, along with removing duplicates I spotted that I didn't spot on the first time through* but I've only just started running that dataset through the network, with an extremely limited set of letters to learn from (10). We'll see how well that works.

* Running a "remove duplicates" command in my text editor doesn't work when the duplicates in question are things like:

The Return of the King
The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings Book 3)
The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings #3)
The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings series)

Comments

[sholio]

I think it's hilarious that nearly all of these sound like actual fantasy books (well, okay, maybe not Spronked Storm and Smoke of Pears - though I would totally read both of those). But between the flexible word patterns and the fact that having really odd words show up in fantasy titles is not unusual, just about any of these could actually be real books/series (er, aside from the ones that actually are real books).

[telophase]

You could probably add the word "Shadow" to any of them and come up with a plausible title, too. Along with "Blood" and "Dark."

I do have a fondness for Smoke of Pears.

[indywind]

I feel like "Smoke of Pears" could be a High Fantasy alchemy quest where the magical spells are recipes.

"Spronked Storm" sounds like a lost novel of Piers Anthony... unpublished during his lifetime, and should have remained that way after his death too.

[telophase]

You're right about the ersatz Anthony there!