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Code recreates Pfizer's 1956 effort to procedurally generate drug names
Friday November 30, 2018. 06:25 PM , from BoingBoing
Procedural generation isn't just for video game landscapes and galaxies. The technique for creating vast amounts of realistic but uncannily superficial content goes back a long way. Pfizer used it to generate drug names in 1956, feeding code to an IBM mainframe and getting potential products in return.
James Ryan (@xfoml) posted excerpts from news article from the time (above), and it's fascinating to read how it's described for a mid-1950s lay audience to whom computers and their ways were utterly alien. Based on the newspaper's description, Hugo (@hugovk) reimplemented the 60-year-old generator, and now you too can generate thousands of realistic but uncannily superficial drug names. Some picks: NEW DRUG NAMES scudyl whirringom reenef entreeic suffuseeta duplexune nickelan raunchyata handbillal gammonasa pluckerel slawax... IMPROPER FOR A FAMILY MEDICINE CHEST loraliva crumpledol moralura burnishite smuttyevo sucklingify hagfishat cockpited moralux ballcockose shittyule cocklesex From the full output list I like 'coughedore' -- like a stevedore, but for unloading mucus. I wonder how long it took Pfizer to realize that procgen is useless.
https://boingboing.net/2018/11/30/code-recreates-pfizers-1956.html
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