Epigram
Overview
Epigram is an idea I came up with while at Brown in the late 1980s, although the seeds of it were actually planted by a wordgame article in (of all places) a Weekly Reader, probably in 2nd grade circa 1972-3.
The idea is, basically, that you have a template, such as "* is the * of *." Each "*" in the template has a set of words which can be used to fill it in. When you run epigram, you tell it the template and the list of words, and it randomly chooses from the list to fill in the template (avoiding duplication where possible).
I came up with a handful of templates, one of which told a little story if you ran it several times in succession. I still have the Turbo Pascal code here somewhere... will post on GitHub when I can.
For a demonstration of Epigram in action, see the Epigram Demonstration Page. Eep! That page seems to have been lost in a migration several years ago, where I [thought I] backed everything up, but many of the folders were empty. Konquerer needs a "paranoid mode" which does a compare after it thinks it is done copying. Ultimately I will rewrite Epigram as a MediaWiki extension...
To Be Done
- Need to write a PHP version so that it can be used within a wiki, for extra silliness. (People could edit the wordlists and submit their own.)
- An OStatus bot like bepis also seems like a thing that should be done.