A Neural Network Invents D&D Spells, and Decides “Dave” Is the Most Magical Name Of All
Research scientist Janelle Shane, whose wonderful neural networks we’ve covered before, has turned her experiments from guinea pig names to D&D spells – and the results are just as entertaining.
She first ran a dataset of 365 examples, and the results weren’t particularly useful or amusing. However, one of her readers – Jo Scott – helped her out by compiling all 1,300 spells from the 4th edition. “Using the new dataset,” Shane explained, “I was able to train a much better-performing neural network. It simply had many more examples of spells to work with; that is, more examples of the words and letter combinations that appear in D&D spells, and thus was able to deduce better rules about how to create them.”
“Even this more-sophisticated neural network is not without some oddities,” Shane continues. “For example, you’ll notice in the results below that it seems to have a particular fondness for bears. And it has invented the name ‘Dave’ which is now, for some reason, its favorite.”
I leave you now with just a few of the wonderful Dungeons & Dragons spells generated by the latest neural network. For the full list of results, including all the Daves, check out Shane’s Lewis & Quark blog.
- Crackling claus
- Tidal treket
- Wall of Storm
- Grasping Mane
- Tweel Strike
- Trickstrak empester
- Phantasmal assault
- Bund Wind
- Dance of Sack
- Poxsare
- Dumination
- Storm of the gifling
- Chorus of the dave
- Song of the doom goom
- Death’s Death’s Proud Bear
- Shield of Farts
- Ward of Snade the Pood Beast
- Summon Storm Bear
- Divine Boom
- Song of blord
- Spirit Boating
- Treeking of Star
- Primal Prayer Bear
- War Cape
- Gate Sail
- Chilled arrow
- Charm of the cods
- Curse Clam
- Cursing wink
- Conjure Mare
- Healing of Bat
- Mordenkainen’s lucubrabibiboricic angion
Tag yourselves, I’m Curse Clam.
Next up, Shane hopes to use her neural network to generate Dungeons & Dragons character names. You can help her with this new project by entering your D&D character’s name, race, and class via this form. As with the spells, the more data she has on hand, the better the results will be – so let’s help her out!
(Via Lewis and Quark; image via Wizards of the Coast, LLC)
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