New Friends episodes are being written by a randomly generating robot

Creating such classic lines as, "Seriously give me a clown on the table that's all."

Clarisse Loughrey
Monday 25 January 2016 11:24 GMT
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Rejoice! New Friends episodes now exist in the world. Only thing is: they've been randomly generated by a computer, all thanks to the functions of a recurrent neural network.

Webcomic artist Andy Herd (AKA Andy Pandy, creator of Pandyland) created the new episodes by feeding every single Friends script into the network, which is capable of both learning and processing sequences.

"It works by predicting the next letter to follow a given sequence of letters, and the predictions are determined by what it learned about language from the Friends dialogue provided," Herd told The Daily Beast. "It can generate stuff within minutes, but it’s barely English. A lot of it is still nonsense." Magical nonsense like this:

[Scene: Chandler and Joey's. Joey is waiting for the door. Ross is looking for Joey and Chandler's stuck on the couch and screaming.]

Chandler: Well, I proposed to my shoe...


Herd confesses he isn't much of an expert with the underlying processes here; utilising a now open sourced Google creation TensorFlow. "I’ve been reading up about machine learning in my spare time lately because it’s really fascinating. I honestly don’t understand a lot of the underlying mathematics, but I’m trying!" he continued. "Also, Satan helped a bit."
 


When asked what he may attempt next, Herd responded: "Maybe Frasier or Seinfeld. Or maybe mash them all together and create The Perfect Sitcom."

It's apt timing ahead of the much-touted Friends semi-reunion happening as part of a tribute to director James Burrows. Maybe they'll just save themselves a buck and use one of Herd's scripts?

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