#martian bat-rat-spider | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

smocksinabox · 6 years

Text

A neural network designs Halloween costumes

It’s hard to come up with ideas for Halloween costumes, especially when it seems like all the good ones are taken. And don’t you hate showing up at a party only to discover that there’s *another* pajama cardinalfish?

I train neural networks, a type of machine learning algorithm, to write humor by giving them datasets that they have to teach themselves to mimic. They can sometimes do a surprisingly good job, coming up with a metal band called Chaosrug, a craft beer called Yamquak and another called The Fine Stranger (which now exists!), and a My Little Pony called Blue Cuss.

So, I wanted to find out if a neural network could help invent Halloween costumes. I couldn’t find a big enough dataset, so I crowdsourced it by asking readers to list awesome Halloween costumes. I got over 4,500 submissions.

The most popular submitted costumes are the classics (42 witches, 32 ghosts, 30 pirates, 22 Batmans, 21 cats (30 incl sexy cats), 19 vampires, and 17 each of pumpkins and sexy nurses). There are about 300 costumes with “sexy” in their names; some of the most eyebrow-raising include sexy anglerfish, sexy Dumbledore, sexy golden pheasant, sexy eyeball, sexy Mothra, Sexy poop emoji, Sexy Darth Vader, Sexy Ben Franklin, Sexy TARDIS, Sexy Cookie Monster, and Sexy DVORAK keyboard. In the “technical challenge” department, we have costumes like Invisible Pink Unicorn, Whale-frog, Glow Cloud, Lake Michigan, Toaster Oven, and Garnet.

All this is to say that humans are very creative, and this task was going to be tricky for a neural network. The sensible approach would be to try to use a neural network that actually knows what the words mean - there are such things, trained by reading, for example, all of Google News and figuring out which words are used in similar ways.There’s a fun demo of this here. It doesn’t have an entry for “Sexy_Gandalf” but for “sexy” it suggests “saucy” and “sassy”, and for “Gandalf” it suggests “Frodo”, “Gollum”, and “Voldemort”, so you could use this approach to go from “Sexy Gandalf” to “Sassy Voldemort”.

I wanted something a bit weirder. So, I used a neural network that learns words from scratch, letter by letter, with no knowledge of their meaning, an open-source char-rnn neural network written in Torch. I simply dumped the 4500 Halloween costumes on it, and told the neural network to figure it out.

Early in the training process, I decided to check in to see how it was doing.

Sexy sexy Dombie Sexy Cat Sexy A stare Rowan Sexy RoR A the Rog Sexy Cot Sexy Purbie Lampire Poth Rat Sexy Por Man The Wombue Pombie Con A A Cat The Ran Spean Sexy Sexy Pon Sexy Dander Sexy Cat The Gull Wot Sexy Pot Hot

In retrospect, I should have expected this. With a dataset this varied, the words the neural network learns first are the most common ones.

I checked in a little later, and things had improved somewhat. (Omitted: numerous repetitions of “sexy nurse”). Still the only thing that makes sense is the word Sexy.

Sexy The Carding Ging Farbat of the Cower Sexy The Hirler A costume Sexy Menus Sexy Sure Frankenstein’s Denter A cardian of the Pirate Ging butter Sexy the Girl Pirate

By the time I checked on the neural network again, it was not only better, but astoundingly good. I hadn’t expected this. But the neural network had found its niche: costume mashups. These are actually comprehensible, if a bit hard to explain:

Punk Tree Disco Monster Spartan Gandalf Starfleet Shark A masked box Martian Devil Panda Clam Potato man Shark Cow Space Batman The shark knight Snape Scarecrow Gandalf the Good Witch Professor Panda Strawberry shark Vampire big bird Samurai Angel lady Garbage Pirate firefighter Fairy Batman

Other costumes were still a bit more random.

Aldonald the Goddess of the Chicken Celery Blue Frankenstein Dancing Bellyfish Dragon of Liberty A shark princess Statue of Witch Cupcake pants Bird Scientist Giant Two butter The Twin Spider Mermaid The Game of Nightmare Lightbare Share Bat The Rocky Monster Mario lander Spork Sand Statue of pizza The Spiding hood A card Convention Sailor Potter Shower Witch The Little Pond Spice of pokeman Bill of Liberty A spock Count Drunk Doll of Princess Petty fairy Pumpkin picard Statue of the Spice of the underworker

It still was fond of using made-up words, though. You’d be the only one at the party dressed as whatever these are.

Sparra A masked scorby-babbersy Scormboor Magic an of the foand tood-computer A barban The Gumbkin Scorbs Monster A cat loory Duck The Barboon Flatue doctor Sparrow Plapper Grankenstein The Spongebog Minional marty clown Count Vorror Rairol Mencoon A neaving hold Sexy Avical Ster of a balana Aly Huntle starber pirate

And it ended up producing a few like this.

Sports costume Sexy scare costume General Scare construct

The reason? Apparently someone decided to help out by entering an entire costume store’s inventory. (”What are you supposed to be?” “Oh, I’m Mens Deluxe IT Costume - Size Standard.”)

There were also some like this:

Rink Rater Ginsburg A winged boxer Ginsburg Bed ridingh in a box Buther Ginsburg Skeleton Ginsburg Zombie Fire Cith Bader Ginsburg

Because someone had entered about 50 variations on Ruth Bader Ginsberg puns (Ruth Tater Ginsberg, Sleuth Bader Ginsber, Rock Paper Ginsberg).

It invented some awesome new superheroes/supervillains.

Glow Wonder Woman The Bunnizer Ladybog Light man Bearley Quinn Glad woman robot Werewolf super Pun Super of a bog Space Pants Barfer buster pirate Skull Skywolk lady Skynation the Goddess Fred of Lizard

And oh, the sexy costumes. Hundreds of sexy costumes, yet it never quite got the hang of it.

Sexy Scare Sexy the Pumpkin Saxy Pumpkins Sexy the Pirate Sexy Pumpkin Pirate Sexy Gumb Man Sexy barber Sexy Gargles Sexy humblebee Sexy The Gate Sexy Lamp Sexy Ducty monster Sexy conchpaper Sexy the Bumble Sexy the Super bass Pretty zombie Space Suit sexy Drangers Sexy the Spock

You bet there are bonus names - and oh please go read them because they are so good and it was so hard to decide which ones to fit into the main article. Includes the poop jokes. You’re welcome.

I’ve posted the entire dataset as open-source on GitHub.

And you can contribute more costumes, for a possible future neural net upgrade (no email address necessary).

12 notes · View notes

aiweirdness · 6 years

Text

A neural network designs Halloween costumes

It's hard to come up with ideas for Halloween costumes, especially when it seems like all the good ones are taken. And don't you hate showing up at a party only to discover that there's *another* pajama cardinalfish?

All this is to say that humans are very creative, and this task was going to be tricky for a neural network. The sensible approach would be to try to use a neural network that actually knows what the words mean - there are such things, trained by reading, for example, all of Google News and figuring out which words are used in similar ways. There’s a fun demo of this here. It doesn’t have an entry for “Sexy_Gandalf” but for “sexy” it suggests “saucy” and “sassy”, and for “Gandalf” it suggests “Frodo”, “Gollum”, and “Voldemort”, so you could use this approach to go from “Sexy Gandalf” to “Sassy Voldemort”.

Early in the training process, I decided to check in to see how it was doing.

In retrospect, I should have expected this. With a dataset this varied, the words the neural network learns first are the most common ones.

I checked in a little later, and things had improved somewhat. (Omitted: numerous repetitions of “sexy nurse”). Still the only thing that makes sense is the word Sexy.

Sexy The Carding Ging Farbat of the Cower Sexy The Hirler A costume Sexy Menus Sexy Sure Frankenstein's Denter A cardian of the Pirate Ging butter Sexy the Girl Pirate

Other costumes were still a bit more random.

It still was fond of using made-up words, though. You’d be the only one at the party dressed as whatever these are.

And it ended up producing a few like this.

Sports costume Sexy scare costume General Scare construct

The reason? Apparently someone decided to help out by entering an entire costume store’s inventory. (”What are you supposed to be?” “Oh, I'm Mens Deluxe IT Costume - Size Standard.”)

There were also some like this:

Rink Rater Ginsburg A winged boxer Ginsburg Bed ridingh in a box Buther Ginsburg Skeleton Ginsburg Zombie Fire Cith Bader Ginsburg

Because someone had entered about 50 variations on Ruth Bader Ginsberg puns (Ruth Tater Ginsberg, Sleuth Bader Ginsber, Rock Paper Ginsberg).

It invented some awesome new superheroes/supervillains.

And oh, the sexy costumes. Hundreds of sexy costumes, yet it never quite got the hang of it.

You bet there are bonus names - Become a supporter of AI Weirdness to read them, and they are so good and it was so hard to decide which ones to fit into the main article. Includes the poop jokes. You’re welcome.

I’ve posted the entire dataset as open-source on GitHub.

And you can contribute more costumes, for a possible future neural net upgrade (no email address necessary).

#neural networks #char-rnn #halloween #halloween costumes #sexy

5K notes · View notes

brokenmusicboxwolfe · 7 years

Text

I saw:

The Angry Red Planet- A space ship thought lost on a voyage to Mars returns, aboard one crew member infected by a mysterious substance and another unable to remember what happened.

The amnesiac woman gets a bit of prodding and recounts the adventures of what had been a four person team. The journey out had been largely uneventful, save for the crazy sexual harrassment she seemed to enjoy from her commanding officer. Office romances are one thing, but geez this guy was so aggressive about it, leaning his body over her and while she is effectively pinned giving her a “Come on baby...” sort of thing. Mom watching muttered to slap him, so you can tell how she felt about it. Our heroine though starts covertly putting on perfume and and the fellas smirk knowingly, smirks I’d like to smack off their faces.

Eventually (and a lot faster than real world estimates) they reach Mars, a planet lush with plant life, some of it carnivorous. What, you didn’t realize Mars was covered with vegetation? Gee, they seem to have known that back around 1969.... Not surprisingly, there are critters about too. They begin to suspect some sort if intelligence at work, which is all but confirmed when a city gets spotted. Maybe the martians won’t be too keen on invaders..,,,,

Now the effects in the movie depend on your point of view. Mars is depicted in a mish mash of 2D drawings and live action, all of it treated with an effect I think they call solarization and tinted very red. For some people I’m sure it just looks cheap, but for me it was all about the imagination trying to create an alien world on a low budget, and ending up in something gorgeously odd. Puppets are used as well, the most delightful is the giant bat-rat-spider with claw like feet. I think I’m in love with that beastie, awkward as it is troding the ground. I wonder how many little kids back in the day had it haunting their nightmares?

So here we have fun visuals, a sensible “you don’t own the universe” message, and woman that actually saves her fella (not that I get what see sees in him) by using her brains. I went in with no expectations and ended up finding it very entertaining!

#movies #the angry red planet

2 notes · View notes

virovac · 7 years

Text

Create a Kaiju Contest Entry 3

Pomogitan

Date Discovered: March 24, 1966

Place of origin: Earth?

Notable Stomping Grounds: Venus

Height: 60 ft from to midpoint of torso.

Length: 90 ft

Powers

The strange hybrid sports the following abilities:

Super Strength

An enhanced healing factor

Immunity to radiation

Passive and active sonar

Variable frequency sonic scream

Tremendous heat resistance, particularly its limbs.

Legs ground body against lighting strikes

Low oxygen requirements

Biology

Pomogitan resembles nothing less than the strange hybrid of white-furred bat and a scale covered cat (minus the rear limbs) placed on top of three sets of crab-like arthropod legs. Its arthropod features possess the color of charred brown with hints of bronze, but its torso is white like a hot flame. Meanwhile, its red, mostly hairless face has a structure similar to a Sphynx breed of cat and a bat(or a cross between a cat and an aye-aye) yet covered in red scales. At rest, the beast’s white fur almost looks like the leaves and branches of a Willow. When angered, a highly developed network of pili muscles cause its which fur to dance like a flickering flame.

Its front legs end in crab-like claws covered in sensory hairs, but can still be used for locomotion when on uneven terrain. Purple scaled cat-like paws, with the addition of an opposable thumbs, hang from arms near the head that act as pedipalps. When it tires of examining an object, but not yet willing to discard it, the item is held by six prehensile limbs similar to the tails of lizard that project from its underside.

Despite its use of echolocation, it is also a visual animal with well developed eyes (as is to be expected for most kaiju, due to the vast amount of light yamaneon crystals. Though the fact its eyes are completely black like Martians has led reptodite scholars to believe Pomogitan must have come from one of the caverns where geological forces cause yamaneon to be covered by other minerals through a process similar to the formation of phantom quartz. Such crystals release yamaneon radiation , but depending on the impurities, various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum will be blocked so not all of the visible spectrum passes through.

When not in hibernation, in its natural state it is slightly more coherent than most suffocating kaiju would be, adding to the evidence that it comes from a low-oxygen environment. Whatever earthen cavern it came from was likely hot and acidic, but still nothing compared to the conditions it encountered on Venus.

History/Personality

It is unknown how this Terran kaiju formed or came to reside on Venus. Perhaps an ancient Yamaneon explosion caused an arthropod kaiju and a synapsid or feline kaiju to fuse together similar to the formation of Gorale. However that does not explain how it ended up on Venus, or why it has survived so well. It has been speculated that its component parts may come from an extremophile cavern ecosystem. Whatever the cause of its origins and transport, it has apparently been on Venus for quite some time, digging into the more stable parts of the planet and existing in a state of hibernation. The Martians themselves are actually quite confused how it arrived to the planet without them noticing, as the vertebrate components of kaiju, while hard to classify, obviously evolved following the war with the Beyonders.

The best way to describe its relationship with the Martians is barely-trained stray cat that showed up one rainy day scratching on the front door in. The kaiju came into contact with the Martians after being awoken by the vibrations of mining equipment. It then quickly made its way to a nearby climate controlled dome, designed as a research outpost. Ignoring all opposition, it created as small a hole as possible in the dome, and squeezed its way through. Once inside, (and the breach sealed by panicking Martians) the creature became docile, so calmed by the gentler climate-controlled conditions that it fell asleep. The dome was quickly abandoned when it was realized the creature had an earthlike biology and was thus a bringer of disease.

Eventually though the martians returned, and study of the creature began.

In time, after a few close calls where it attempted predatory behavior on the martians (which was stopped by sonic devices taking advantage of the beasts sensitive hearings), classical conditioning was employed to ease it into tolerating Martian examination.

Eventually, though it grew restless and began scratching on the walls repeatedly, as if indicating it wanted to go out. In response, an airlock was built and the strange hybrid learned how to signal its desire to use the device.

While greatly preferring the conditions of the Martian dome, the urge to explore keeps it from taking permanent refuge from the Venusian elements. Allowing simple cameras and other electronics to be noninvasively attached to itself, its wandering nature has been utilized by the Martian colonists to assist in mapping the fluctuating geography of Venus. It has been provided with armor for dealing with acid rain and respirators (specially designed to conduct its sonic attacks) to help it not be so short-of-breath, and protective gloves for its paws. While tolerant of the Martians, and even allowing them to attach mechanical sensory devices to record its travels ; it does what it wants and goes where it wants, when it wants. Though it cannot be herded in any desired direction, its ability to repel many Venusian kaiju with its sonic screams has greatly benefited the efforts of keeping up-to-date geological and cartographic records of the dynamic, constantly changing planet.

To the entourage of Martian mecha that accompany it on journeys, it is somewhat social, and occasionally shows protective behavior. However its social behavior is not that of an equal, but that of a disinterested, inattentive parent. Still, its keen sense have repeatedly forewarned of incoming threats, and it does try to attend to the physical needs of the machines as well as it can. if a machine gets stuck, it will help it escape. If a machine becomes incapable of movement it will carry the injured until it can be brought home to be repaired, having learned from observing recovery operations that its companions can sometimes return from apparent death with repairs and a new pilot. However,its nurturing instincts have limits: it will not fight to the death for the safety of its companions and has no problem sacrificing one ally in order to see that the rest escape.

Is indifferent to other kaiju, concerning itself with items such as smaller life forms or interesting rocks. If another kaiju attempts unwanted interaction, it will fight defensively, but aim its strikes for soft parts or sensory organs while it tries different sonic frequencies until it finds one that incapacitates its opponent or sends them fleeing; though if the fight goes too far in its opponent's favor it has no problems fleeing itself. If anything makes the mistake of attacking it while napping though,it will throw a tremendous fit and threat display, only being quelled by sounds louder than its own.

While other kaiju seek to conquer each other, Pomogitan seeks to conquer the hostile planet it now calls home.To the hybrid kaiju, mountains are there to be climbed, rivers of lava to be waded through despite the discomfort, and caves exist to be explored. Hostile kaiju are just another obstacle to be avoided or overcome.

When investigating items of curiosity, Pomogitan uses its front crab-like limbs to to hold them away from its body in case they may be dangerous. If they seem safe, it will bring them in closer to be examined by its hand-like paws. Once it tires of examining an object, but is not yet willing to discard it, the six tail like appendages hanging from its body are used to carry the item until it loses interest.

Treating the Martian colony as a home base, this packrat kaiju returns with objects of interest it finds. Once they have brought their item home, it rapidly loses interest, allowing the Martians to seize it if they desire.

While it was considered sending Pomogitan to Earth to assist against the Beyonders, it was on an expedition at the time and its home base also lacked the capability to act as launch site. Pomogitan instead became known to Earth in 1966, when the Soviet lander Univa arrived on Venus The device was intercepted by the kaiju, and carried around until it ceased transmitting. This turned out to be a benefit, as the lander had crashed and its antennae had been pointing at the ground. Through its own curiosity, the kaiju’s actions actually ended up assisting the cause of Earth science.

The Soviet Union was too pleased about its accomplishment of having the first lander on Venus, and quickly released as much information as they could while downplaying mechanical failures. Due to faulty camera systems, only a few grainy photos of Venus and the Kaiju were obtained, but all other sensory equipment gave valuable information of the ground level conditions of Venus. Despite attempts to downplay the kaiju’s involvement in the success of the mission, the international news media latched onto the idea of a friendly Venusian lifeform. Due to lack of visual information, it is the first kaiju named without knowing what it fully looks like: its name being coined from the Russian word for help and titans of Greek myth. While the overall shape of the missions’ savior is unknown to humanity, it is likely that from the recordings of its cries it will be recognized when Earth continues its exploration.