Mark V. Shaney at Your Service

Mark V. Shaney is a Python script which takes in a typically fairly large body of text and generates another [smaller] body of text which resembles the original, usually with hilarious side-effects. This page is simply a web interface to the script for all those people fortunate enough to have never acquired a savviness for nerdy coding. Mark V. Shaney was first written by Bruce Ellis.

READ THIS CAREFULLY. The larger your text body, the better (more hilarious) the results. Best used with around 3000 words. However, DO NOT insert text that is too large. Your http connection will likely time out if you do so. Also, please use text with punctuation. Mark V. Shaney is designed to recognize periods as the end of sentences.

How does it work?
Roughly speaking, this script first finds all 3-word groups within the given text. Then it builds sentences by taking the last two words currently in the current sentence being built and finding a valid word to add on to the end . A word is valid if it, along with the current last 2 words, completes a 3-word group found in the given text. Therefore, sentences will appear to have local structure. However, as a whole, these sentences will typically come out as complete nonsense. This process is known as a Markov Chain (Mark V. Shaney, get it?).

Python Code

Shaney's Blog

The Original Experiment