Saturday, September 25, 2010

amazon pay phrases

has anyone used Amazon's payphrase system or know anything about it? I am becoming a little obsessed with writing down their suggestions. They seem a system of text generation too sensible to be completely random, and too random to be sensible... here are a few favorites:

Phoebe's regrettable viewpoint
Phoebe's fresh ducks
Phoebe's portable sweets
Phoebes intuitive patron
Phoebe's bright flit
Phoebe's past hover
Phoebe's tacit glance
Phoebe's slight growth
Phoebe's noble javelin
Phoebe's main flash
Phoebe's slight aroma
Phoebe's gravitational glance
Phoebe's faint growl
Phoebe's evident ambition
Phoebe's oversized lawn dart
Phoebe's technical drive

I've asked the Electronic writing/CS people at Brown, but no-one seems to know the program that writes these. There's something great about the randomly generated specifics of their particular selection of adjective-noun combos, sometimes a little creepy....

2 comments:

  1. Ah-ha! Hubby is a senior software engineer for Hewlett Packard and he says that it's most likely a tailored computer program - and likely written using the same code/style as that used for slot machines. Basically, it uses a dictionary generator which pulls words at random and puts them together in random sequence...though, as hubby pointed out, when I went to buy a wall hook, my phrase was "Odette's Unbroken Brass", which seems doesn't seem random at all. Interestingly, "Odette's Fat Ass" was "no longer available" according to Amazon. Relief all 'round.

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