The Time of Monsters
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
We have spent time reanimating a monster this week. Ephemerald is an editor for Tracery grammars, an elegantly simple unfolding text generation system. What does that mean? It means that it’s a tool that anyone can use to make variations of sentences. You give the system some templates and options about how they can be filled out and it spits out a filled-out template in return. There is some random involved, but also a lot of control over the randomisation.
We have used Ephemerald to create Twitter bots but it can be used for any purpose where you need a limited amount of variation of text. The above image is a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) image – and image format that is purely made up of text. If it’s composed of text, Ephemerald can produce variations.
For Tiphareth, we trained a language model to produce text but the sacred geometry-inspired decorations were created with Ephemerald.
This technique shines most in domains with a lot of structure in their texts, e.g. cooking recipes.
The monstrous part is that we let these systems run on their own. We breed them and care for them for a little while but at some point we turn them into autonomous creatures of the ether. And they will roam cyberspace until Cheap Bots Done Quick goes out of service.
How does it work?
You write rules for how text should be generated like the below snippet that picks two heisters from a list and sends them on a heist.
The result is that the system creates variations. Two by two the heisters go on heists in varying team-ups.
There are of course many more features that you can work with and since today there’s even a help menu that — voilà — helps you.
The feature list of this monster is:
It contains an introduction to Tracery in the help menu so you can get going.
Ephemerald has syntax highlighting for a people-friendly editing experience.
The monster has auto-completion
You can bulk export generated text (currently 50 or 500 expansions)
JSON export to upload your grammar to Cheap Bots Done Quick to comfortably make a Twitter bot
SVG rendering for procedural graphics so you can preview them nicely.
The Monster of Time
Ephemerald is a part of the old world, closer related to Lindenmayer Systems than to machine learning. And yet, you will be surprised to hear, no doubt, the heading of this whole newsletter was a poetic exaggeration. The old world is alive and kicking and we see a lot of potential in combining traditional and modern approaches. The monster of time is screaming disruption, but the world doesn’t always care about the noise.