Garden path sentence

Re:Garden path sentence by willvarfar on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @04:00AM (#10619807)

The name "garden path" reminds me that during my Turbo Pascal loving 80s I played with making “fog” from markov chains. The idea was to computer-generate reasonable-reading nonsense text and I'm sure you've all tried it as kids too! :)

Of course my naive approach suffered from lack of corpus; if it picked a rare word, it’d get railroaded into using the very limited set of words that follow that rare word and so on.

I remember running it - this was before the internet days, so I can’t imagine where I got the input text from - and getting back a page-full of gobbledygook. And there right in the middle, somehow drawing the eye like a magnet, was one of those railroaded sentences:

herbaceous

Well when your random roulette picks the word herbaceous, its likely only seen it once or so in its learning text, so there aren’t so many words it can pick next:

herbaceous border

So far so good. But where does this lead next?

herbaceous border disputes

Love it!

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Re:Garden path sentence by Swizec on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @05:30AM (#10620054)

I could swear you've posted this exact comment before.

Or is it a meme by now? Google finds four results of this phrase:

http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-s...

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/sgght/comparin...?

https://www.reddit.com/comments/108q4b/markov_chain_poem_tra...

http://encode.ru/threads/2225-A-jackhammer-it-doesn%E2%80%99...

But it turns out all of those are you. Does your computer beep every time somebody posts about markov chains, so that you can go post this comment? Do you have it saved on your machine, ready for copy paste?

I feel like I'm in an XKCD strip right now.

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Re:Garden path sentence by uououuttt on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @06:38AM (#10620223)

Whoa, did you realize that you commented on it 3 years ago in that second reddit link?

Anyway, no harm in sharing willvarfar. First time I've seen your comment!

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Re:Garden path sentence by feintruled on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @08:59AM (#10620681)

But this is wonderful! In the context of the discussion..

The guy who had told the story before who had told the guy who had told the story before had forgotten had forgotten.

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Re:Garden path sentence by taliesinb on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @06:49AM (#10620240)

That got surreal fast!

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Re:Garden path sentence by willvarfar on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @05:57AM (#10620113)

Yeap, all me. Its one of my fondest recollections of early programming. :)

So sorry it offends you.

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Re:Garden path sentence by HCIdivision17 on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @11:04AM (#10621468)

Heh, I think it's actually useful. Cross-posting is sort of a form of intellectual cross-pollination; some people are allergic, but others appreciate the second chances. I don't read those other forums, so I'd have missed out on that little nugget.

And I tried to make that last sentence a garden path one, to keep the comment on topic, but jeez it's hard to break the habit of avoiding them. I suspect it's deeply ingrained in me to an instinctual level by my 11th grade rhetoric teacher. (Her whole goal was to, and I quote, "make our insides scrunch when we saw a comma splice." Most who took her class would agree her curriculum was a resounding success, even after she also taught us to break the rules.)

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Re:Garden path sentence by Swizec on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @01:54PM (#10622702)

You misunderstand. It doesn't offend me. It is a delightful incident.

herbaceous border disputes has become one of my favourite stories about markov chains. It's part of internet lore for me :)

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Re:Garden path sentence by mcphage on Tuesday November 24, 2015 @09:55AM (#10621017)

> Google finds four results of this phrase

> Does your computer beep every time somebody posts about markov chains

I haven't done any actual counting, but I'm like 80% sure Markov Chains have been mentioned more than 4 times on the internet.

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