DadaDodo: Exterminate All Rational Thought

DadaDodo is a text generator or “travesty generator” like Dissociated Press. The code is available and unlike programs that randomly cut up text it “it scans bodies of text, and builds a probability tree expressing how frequently word B tends to occur after word A, and various other statistics; then it generates sentences based on those probabilities.” DadaDodo is described by its creator Jamie Zawinski thus:

DadaDodo is a program that analyses texts for word probabilities, and then generates random sentences based on that. Sometimes these sentences are nonsense; but sometimes they cut right through to the heart of the matter, and reveal hidden meanings.

Zawinski’s page has a “cut up” look with downloadable code and interesting links, many of which are no longer active, alas. The effect of DadaDodo are hard to interpret without knowing what the corpus is that it starts with. I am tempted to create a TAPoRware version so that it can be used on existing web pages.