Clojure Markov Chains

Here we have a deceptively simple looking Clojure file for generating Markov chains, and using those chains to generate text.

Why? Because it's kinda cool. And I had to write "a significant program of [my] choosing in Clojure".

How does it work?

At present there is no interface, you just modify the last line of markov.clj with some text to be used for the chain (or a file), and how many words you want generated.

Running the file will spit out the fun generated text.

Sample text

There are four sample files located in the txt directory. They could be used for a body of initial data. Those files are:

1. arcade-fire.txt: The lyrics to most Arcade Fire songs. Who knows, you might be able to get their next hit from this generator...

2. lovecraft-at-the-mountains-of-madness.txt: HP Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. For getting random text out of a classic pulp story. Plus it's really large. Like the largest file included. (WARNING: It takes forever to parse...)

3. mahoney-killfilesystem.txt: A blog post titled Let's at least start to consider killing the plain old file system by Mark Mahoney. The original can be found at http://markm208.blogspot.com/2014/01/lets-at-least-start-to-consider-killing.html

4. mahoney-multiposts.txt: Multiple blog posts (like 5-ish) by Mark Mahoney.

Other Files

• old-markov.clj: The original version of this program. Chain generation is more recursive, which caused stack overflows when parsing At the Mountains of Madness and the Arcade Fire songs. It works fine with smaller samples.

• test-markov.clj: Some tests...