swiftcoder

I'd like us to require some sort of byline for the new articles. As it stands, it is very hard to tell at a glance if the author speaks with any authority.

 

As an example, consider the Social Media Handbook Policy - it seems like a great article, but it is dispensing legal advice, and I have no indication whether the author is actually a lawyer:

• The article contains no mention of the author's profession or employer.
• The author only recently joined GameDev, and has no posts.
• The author's profile contains no indication of their profession or employer, and uses a generic gmail address.

 

Now, in this particular case, you can punch the author's name into google, and discover she is an attorney at the NLRB, with a solid history of video game-related research.

 

But this won't work for lesser-known individuals, or those with more common names, and I shouldn't have to google to find this out, when it could be called out in the article itself...

I've just started mucking with C# generics, and it seems that I'm running headlong into their limitations. In C++ I can do something like this:

template <typename T>
void Write(T data) {
     int size = T.SizeInBytes;
     // ...
}

And I can call Write() with any type that contains an integer-compatible member variable named 'SizeInBytes'. If one tries to do the same in C#:

public void Write<T>(T data) where T : struct {
     int size = T.SizeInBytes;
     // ...
}

Then it errors out with "error CS0119: Expression denotes a `type parameter', where a `variable', `value' or `type' was expected". Quite reasonably, since C# doesn't allow the use of expressions with generic types which can't be applied solely given the constraints.

Are there any common idioms to working around this? Assuming that (a) I need to work with value types, and (b) these structs are defined in a 3rd party library (i.e. I can't modify the definition of the struct itself).

I'm busy working on techniques for procedural name generation, because, quite frankly, existing approaches seem to leave a lot to be desired. My requirements are:

• Near unlimited number of names can be generated
• Names look and sound reasonable
• Names can be generated in a variety of languages/dialects

I started out with a simple Markov generator (because Markov chains seem to be the weapon of choice in the text generation arena), but I quickly found a lack of balance between order 2-3 Markov chains, which often return impossible (in the context of valid English spelling) character sequences, and degenerate order 4 chains, which just return selections from their input text.

So I decided that a better avenue might be to explore a pronunciation model, where we generate names based on phonemes, and then translate the results back into text (i.e. graphemes).

I've built a system that does braindead-simple (but suprisingly effective) text->phoneme conversion in order to train the model, and then uses a pair of Markov chain models to actually generate the text. The first Markov model is used to generate procedural strings of phonemes, and the second is used to translate that string into legal grapheme sequences (i.e. text). Look at a few examples of the output...

# trained with the 1,000 most popular American baby names of 2011
kegan
declan
maver
elisay
dan
jared
mikay
peytonykeelynn
klare
adwin

# trained with the 360 most popular Spanish names
vicen
fidela
ysaas
uma
rosa
valentin
florena
gabrah
wendra
dino

# trained with the ~2,000 most popular Russian names
vilma
soree
pera
ovarsonaya
tonya
stopolina
belga
alina
sascha
prosdoia

# and for completeness, ~200 names from Tolkien
aldor
anardil
acainaro
atanamir
barahir
aldaron
baggins
bregil
arthedain
bifhad

Apart from a tendency to spit out verbatim names from the training set, and the (fairly rare) long junk name, this seems to work pretty well. But I'd like to make it better - which is where you guys come in.

I don't have enough of a background in linguistics to know where I should be looking for techniques/approaches to improve my algorithm. I'd be very appreciative of any links to relevant literature in the field, or just general brainstorming on approaches I could apply...

 fabula.zip   20.56K   42 downloads
(python source and word lists are attached, if you want to have a poke around)

If you look at my 'Reputation Earned' page, there are a couple of recent +3 events, that seem to be bogus.

http://www.gamedev.net/user/47521-swiftcoder/page__tab__smrep (Look for 'Unity with C++', and 'Terrain Lighting')

Unlike regular reputation events, they link to a 404 page. And they aren't associated with any rating actions in that thread that I can see - I haven't received +3 total in either thread, nor have I given out +3.