There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
-- Phil Karlton
Expecting a child, and feeling overwhelmed by the task of finding a name that he/she will bear for the rest of his/her life?
I have you covered. Actually Rust & graph theory do.
- This is a tool to explore name ideas interactively, rather than pick a single name for you
firstname-choosersuggests names, you rate them and the next suggestions will be taylored according to your previous choices- No machine learning or opaque algorithms here, just good old graph theory
- Choices are stored on filesystem, so you can stop and resume later
- Build a graph where nodes are names, and edges are Levenshtein distances between names
- The first name is picked randomly in the graph
- Pick the next name by maximizing or minimizing distance to names previously chosen, depending on whether they were liked or not
- "commonness factor": this is a float value in the [0.0; 1.0] range to tweak behavior around name commonness (according to previous years statistics)
- 0 will only consider your previous choices ignoring name commonness
- 1 will ignore your choices and suggest names only according to their commonness
- obviously values in between will consider both, to a degree that depends on the value
- in my experience the sweet spot is between 0.4 and 0.5.
- Graph in memory is a 2D vector of distances, to represent a "half matrix" (distance between a and b is the same as between b and a, so no need to store it twice)
- Graph is built using a thread pool for performance
- Once the graph construction is fast enough, most of the tuning is actually in the optional source filtering, ie:
- computing name weighting from source data
- removing names given before year X
- removing compound names
- removing too short names
You need a Rust build environment for example from rustup.
Set toolchain to nightly with rustup override set nightly and run cargo run --release -- -h to build and get command line help.
For now this only contains a source for French names.
Before adding other languages or data source, I should probably add a NameSource trait. PR welcome if you care enough.