Eureka Invention Generator
- App URL
- http://eurekaapp.com/
- Source URL
- http://github.com/mongoose/eureka/tree/master
- Description
Eureka is a web-based application that generates inventions. It is essentially a frontend for a Markov processor that analyzes US patent application abstracts and spits out random text based on word frequencies of the source material.
Data.gov provides weekly XML files of patent application bibliographic data. Bundled with Eureka is a shell script that validates and parses this XML into text files containing 1000 abstracts each. These text files can then be fed to the Markov processor. The resulting text is in effect babbling in the language of patent abstracts.
While simple, this concept is remarkably powerful. The generated text seems believable, given its natural flow, but is inherently nonsensical.
This application was submitted by Evan Meagher on August 6, 2009