Random Text

No, it's not that I couldn't think of a title, this really is about random text. I had this great idea one day. My girlfriend wanted more emails from me (she's never satisfied), and I remembered reading about computer generated writing in an issue of Scientific American. It was in the now defunct Computer Recreations column written by A.K. Dewdney. I don't remember what issue, but it's probably around 1986 or so. Anyway, you feed the program some text, it builds a table of the probabilities of one word following another, and spews out prose.

Upon seeing the lines of semi-readable gibberish it was capable of spewing forth, I thought to myself, "This is totally useless!" And what do you do with useless stuff? Why, put it on the web of course! So, here it is. You can click on one of the links to get a sample for some input I had on hand, or give your own URL for a page to use as input. Web pages with lots of formatting in them don't work so well, as my program has a hard time stripping it out. Try a page that is mostly text, like this one.

If you use your browser's reload button, you will get totally new and different output. You can never read it all!

Enter your own URL:
Or use one of mine: Some selection, eh?

Trent Piepho
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