Garfield + Markov Chain = Garkov

Posted by Alex in Cartoon & Comic on June 8, 2008 at 1:47 pm


We’ve posted about the Internet phenomenon of Garfield Minus Garfield, where the fat orange cat is removed from Jim Davis’ comic strip (resulting in a bizarre yet strangely coherent depiction of Jon Arbuckle as a schizophrenic ).

Now meet Garkov by Josh Millard:

It’s a probability driven strip generator that builds Markov tables from transcripts of existing strips and then synthesizes and renders novel text as a new strip. The results are sometimes pretty apt and sometimes deeply weird, and I’m pretty happy with it so far.

(Markov chain is a probabilistic model)

Link - via Metafilter


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COMMENT

9 comments to "Garfield + Markov Chain = Garkov"

  1. CheeseDuck
    June 8th, 2008 at 2:14 pm

    They don’t make any sense :D

  2. Josh Millard
    June 8th, 2008 at 2:39 pm

    Hi! Thanks for the link! I’m glad you’re liking it.

    And agreed, CheeseDuck: most of the generated strips are just plain nonsensical. Pure Markov models are really naive things — that they can generate readable text at all says more about the structural redundancy of natural language than anything. But it’s that weird, fractured insensisibility that I find so charming about the output.

  3. v.dog
    June 8th, 2008 at 3:17 pm

    Yeah, most of them make no sense at at all, but occasionally you find a gem like this one:
    http://joshmillard.com/garkov/savestrip.cgi?strip=14226

  4. Chaz
    June 8th, 2008 at 3:59 pm

    I like http://joshmillard.com/garkov/showstrip.cgi?strip=15733

  5. ted
    June 8th, 2008 at 4:53 pm

    I guess it goes to show how useful math really is.

    Don’t get it. Don’t care to get it.

  6. jmp478
    June 8th, 2008 at 5:23 pm

    Wow, computers suck at jokes.
    Better leave it to Jim Davis

  7. InSpain
    June 8th, 2008 at 10:11 pm

    In Spain we hate that stupid orange cat.

  8. twodollars
    June 8th, 2008 at 10:38 pm

    very awesome. In my 10 minutes of messing around, I came across this

    http://joshmillard.com/garkov/showstrip.cgi?strip=32730

  9. Homer J. Simpson
    June 9th, 2008 at 2:26 pm

    I wonder what it is about Garfield that has inspired people to do so many weird things with Garfield strips. In any case, I find this phenomenon pretty interesting. It’s probably been many years since I paid much attention to Garfield, but now I think I’m a fan again.


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