Researcher creates over 100 unique craft beer names using neural network

After naming paint colours, metal bands, and guinea pigs, researcher Janelle Shane has used her neural network - a program that can learn to imitate datasets just by looking at enough examples - to come with unique beer names.

The 'name-game' started when Gizmodo's Ryan Mandelbaum mentioned the issues craft brewers were facing while naming beers in an article about Shane's artificial intelligence-generated paint names. As the subject has already led to a number of legal and Twitter battles in the past, the researcher dealt with the trouble and delivered a whole AI-generated list of unique names for brewers to use.

Shane - with the help of a Gizmodo reader who pulled together a list of beer names from BeerAdvocate.com and a friend who arranged that data into broader group - plugged the names into the neural network and came up with a big bunch of new and unique names, which according to the researcher "were plausible, or weirdly awesome, or so outlandish that they sounded like the sort of beer you could only buy after a multi-day scavenger hunt involving hang gliding, codebreaking, and Fairbanks, Alaska".

The list carrying names like "The Bopberry Stout, Cherry Coconut Mint Chocolate Stout, Black Morning, Heaven Cat, Shock State, Sacky Rover, and Single Horde" is available on Shane's official blog. The researcher said, "For these names, I turned the neural network's creativity variable higher and got results that can be described mainly as ... interesting".

She also noted that she had about 100 more beer names, which will be sent to users signing up through her blog.