Played around with this tonight rather than watch the truly awful (not my pick) Jupiter Ascending thing on Netflix. Channing Tatum was a dog, apparently.
Here’s the last three the prototype bot picked. Are they too hard? It uses Wikipedia ‘all aircraft’ so it should be either very easy or very hard, or even in-between. If these look ok then I’ll continue fiddling with it.
I am imaging something like
[randomaircraft]
…typed in a new post would ‘roll the dice’ and produce something like this below:
Some results of the random picks so far (just last 3 I tried):
Hmm, middle one broke. I think it’s probably got at least a 1 in 10 of not working due to how the data is in wikipedia. I think it’ll be easier if people just deleted ‘bad rolls’, as otherwise it ramps up the complexity, i.e. use a 2nd source to verify or something.
Looks great! I was worrying it might be easier with a random bot than with people picking obscure aircraft…
But I still have no idea, so I think it’s got the right difficulty level
How about using those online lists for aircraft names and types, and then attemping to retrieve the corresponding image from wikipedia? Then you start of with a functional name.
EDIT: Holy crap, not sure how you made the bot, but perhaps start from here?
It actually does use that list. It takes the 0-A - Z sub list categories list from wikipedia, randomizes it, then goes look per choice to see if the article has an image and if it does then chooses it but if not then back to the random pool. I’m limited by about 5000 articles per query, so the pool is only about 140,000 aircraft but think I might have a way around that. All the images are wikipedia commons.
This was sort of an excuse to play with the wikipedia API too,
It’s horrible to work with, I don’t like ruby as a language (what the forum plugin uses) and about 30% of the aircraft description articles seems pretty bad in terms of quality, but apart from that, still more fun than Jupiter Ascending.
@EinsteinEP - the image hover name bit is annoying, you’re right. It happens when the forum grabs a local copy to stop link rot. Hmm, I might be able to tweak styles to stop the hover title bit, but not sure…
Ok, experimentally, sort of, live. Typing randomaircraft (surrounded by square brackets) into a new post invokes the bot. It’s not quite done, so if it generates something bad, just delete the post.
