Word-machine of LagadoTHE LAGADO MACHINELagadian professor showing results of his machine.

In Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift envisioned a machine that could generate creative new phrases by rearranging text automatically — now the realization of his vision is at your fingertips!

Get started by mixing up given quotes from various topics or remixing a chapter of Swift's novel, rearrange your own text, or learn more about this machine in the introduction.

LAGADIZE QUOTES

Choose one of the topics on the right to remix quotes from that field and discover the wisdom of chance!

Click the buttons again and again to produce ever new results. Note that while our library of quotes is much bigger, every output will be limited to 20 sentences for convenient reading.

LAGADIZE GULLIVER'S TRAVELS Part III, Chapter IV

Remix the chapter describing the academy of Lagado from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.

Click the button again and again to produce ever new results. Note that while the chapter is much longer, every output will be limited to 20 sentences for convenient reading.

LAGADIZE YOUR OWN TEXT

PLEASE COPY YOUR INPUT TO USE IT AGAIN BEFORE RUNNING THE MACHINE
PLEASE MAKE SURE YOUR INPUT CONTAINS AT LEAST 5 DIFFERENT SENTENCES
THE INPUT MUST NOT CONTAIN MORE THAN 50 000 CHARACTERS
EVERY OUTPUT WILL BE LIMITED TO 20 SENTENCES FOR CONVENIENT READING
DO NOT USE SENSITIVE INFORMATION

THE BACKGROUND

In 1726, Jonathan Swift published — in Gulliver's Travels — a description of a wonderful "word machine" at the Academy of Lagado, the capital of Balnibarbi. This machine, a prescient forerunner of our modern computers, occupied the larger part of a room at the academy. For six hours a day, forty pupils under the direction of a professor would crank the machine to generate random word sequences on movable wooden blocks, then copy out any sequences of three or four words together that seemed worth saving. This professor describes the value of his invention as follows: "Every one knew how laborious the usual method is of attaining to arts and sciences; whereas, by his contrivance, the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study."

Modern technology has finally caught up with the imagination of Jonathan Swift, and like that professor you may now easily generate your own body of creative phrases, starting from the most mundane of sample texts. Simply select or provide a seed text and our Lagado Machine will spew forth streams of rich semantic ore from which you (or your Mechanical Turk minions) can mine new works of science or literature. And in contrast to the professor's quote, you neither have to be ignorant, spend anything, nor physically work to use this machine!

One inspiration for building this machine as a computer program was the M-x dissociated press command in the Emacs text editor. Dr. Kenneth Laws ran across this text synthesizer some 35 years ago, and has wanted to build a word-based version ever since. (Dissociated press generates character strings with appropriate Markov n-tuple frequencies, creating some fascinating new "words" but having little coherence to in the generated text.) The CS101 course offered by the new online-university UDACITY gave him the tools.

His initial attempt was an algorithm that scanned ahead in the text for the next occurrence of the previous tuple, in the manner of dissociated press. However, Python dictionaries offered a much better way to parse the seed text and generate a simulation of it. Specifically, the seed text is first tokenized and is then scanned once for each Markov order that is needed.
Markov-based synthesis is well known to linguists. A problem with simple implementations is that 2nd-order Markov models generate text that is "creative" but too random and incoherent; 3rd-order models are often a bit too constrained and uncreative; and 4th-order models are so constrained that they tend to recreate the seed text exactly. We have therefore used a mixture model to create readable but creative results.


Have fun with it!

Dr. Kenneth I. Laws • Concept & Lagado Machine Code CONTACT

Raphael Großmaß • Website Design & Development CONTACT



LICENSE, RESOURCES & TERMS OF USE

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

"Work" here refers to the functionality and layout of this website provided by the code written by the authors. The authors claim no copyright, license or rights for the resources used to create this web application, which include, but are not limited to: 1) The functionality provided by the service also hosting this website, Google App Engine, 2) The jQuery Javascript library, 3) The resources used to create parts of the text input for this machine and to create the illustrations, namely the book Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, which is in the Public Domain.
The authors also do not claim any copyright for the name "Lagado", which here refers to the fictional city described in Gulliver's Travels.


By accessing and using this website the user acknowledges the following:

The authors take no responsibility for any damage that may be caused by using this website. The authors also take no responsibility for the security of any data or information that may be used by the user as text input for this application.

The user is solely responsible for the input text he may provide using this website and is hereby informed that any input may be visible to the service providing the hosting of this website, namely Google, although the authors did not implement any permanent storage of user input. The user agrees not to use any sensitive information as text input for this application.

The text results shown to the user by using this application do not represent the views or beliefs of the authors in any way.


The authors referred to above are:

Dr. Kenneth I. Laws • Concept & Lagado Machine Code CONTACT

Raphael Großmaß • Website Design & Development CONTACT