Computer generated erotica in the style of Fifty Shades of Gray, for the discerning technophile.
This is the code backing my website, xwray.com/fiftyshades. It's a set of grammar and vocabulary rules written by hand.
##This is a Markov chain text generator, right? Nope. Markov chain generators produce text that "sounds" right but is meaningless (although sometimes the juxtapositions can seem poetic or profound). Most text generators on the web are Markov generators, and given the right conditions, it can work really well. Here's an great explanation of how they work. They're also really easy to make, because all you need is an algorithm (there are many open source ones online) and a corpus (the text you want to parody). This, however, is not one.
##So how does this work? Imagine that you've read 50 Shades of Gray -- now you feel equipped to write your own parody. Not too hard, right?
Now, try instructing your friend to write a parody scene, who has never read the book.
Now -- imagine giving instructions to write a parody to a friend who has never read a book.
The computer doesn't even know what English is. You write super-detailed instructions to tell it how to put together the sentences from words and phrases.
Basically, it's a set of rules, fed through an "engine" that recursively evaluates them -- in fact, it's built on recursive grammars. While it's possible, as I do here, you do not have to make meaningful text this way. In fact, most examples of the genre don't (see the Postmodernism Generator). But my personal challenge -- and the source of humor of this particular project -- is in generating text so indistinguishable from the original material that it provokes cognitive dissonance at knowing it was computer generated.
This code is written in pb format and designed for use with the Dada Engine by Andrew C. Bulhak. Once you've downloaded the project, you run it on the command line with your script as an argument:
% ./dada 50shades.pb
This is how the documentation explains it:
The command dada first pipes your script (in this case `myscript.pb') through the C preprocessor; this allows you to include preprocessor macros, conditional definitions and external libraries of rules. The output of the preprocessor is then sent to pb, a program which reads in and evaluates the rules.
The pb command reads the complete input before it emits anything. Once it has read everything, it evaluates the initial rule (also known as the start symbol); in turn, this causes any rules invoked from the initial rule to be evaluated. Unless a start symbol is specified on the command line, the first rule read that is not defined as a resource rule becomes the start symbol.
As the rules are evaluated, the text generated is appended to a buffer in memory; once everything has been evaluated, the buffer's contents are emitted.
I encourage you to read the Dada Engine's manual, especially the section explaining the pb language. As you can see, the tool itself is pretty simple, but you can achieve uncanny results by carefully hand-tuning your grammar.
You can find other examples of pb files by downloading the Dada Engine from the website above. There's also a mirror of the Dada Engine on Github here.
The documentation for the Dada Engine explicitly states "If a rule has several options, the same option will never be chosen twice in immediate succession." As far as I can tell, this isn't true, it's very annoying, it's very annoying, and it's a huge problem with the engine. See what I did there? Consider yourself duly warned.
Questions, comments, and feedback welcomed at lisawray+fiftyshades@gmail.com.