Markov Chains

I have been working on generating random world maps and decided to give name generation a shot. I now have a header file that can be fed words to generate new words using the input as a dataset.

Forming a dataset

It should be noted first that I will be using n to represent the number of letters we are storing as our key in the map.

First things first, we need to generate a dataset, to store this dataset I used the following variable:

map<string, vector<pair<int char>>> markov_data

Which means we access it as follows:

following_letter_frequency = markov_data[N-LETTER PAIR]

So for each n-letters we store every possible character that comes after, we store this in a pair with an integer that we can incrememt to represent the frequency in which this character appears after the n-letters.

So, I loop through the input data, take every n-sets of letters and store the following letter in the corresponding pair vector.

Creating new data

Now, all we have to do is get a random key for our map as our start, then pick the next letters to come after our current last n letters, we do this an appropriate amount of times to create reasonably sized names (4-9ish). I decided to ensure that the random start decided by the key always has at least vowel, as I didn’t think names like that looked right.

Output

eyci
adee
rallech
vamelc
ecari
uend
tunnid
ubinesig
verina
eital
xinah
iphilda
uzylysph
ierta