Or, the time a class of middle schoolers kicked my butt at neural network ice cream naming.
The other day I got an email from Anita Johnson, who teaches coding classes at Kealing Middle School in Austin, Texas. She explained that her students had been reading the neural network experiments on my blog and had decided to do their own.
The middle schoolers (about 11-14 years old) had downloaded textgenrnn and had generated some new flavors that they wanted to share with me. Did I want to see them?
As it turns out, I had just trained textgenrnn on ice cream flavors myself. But there were some problems with my attempt:
1. I only had a dataset of 200 flavors (that I had a dataset at all is thanks to Salli Wason of Rosanna’s Ice Cream in Portland).
2. textgenrnn allows transfer learning, meaning that it remembers some of what it learned from its previous dataset.
3. My previous dataset had been metal bands.
So the flavors I had generated were not, shall we say, appealing.
The 11-14 year olds, however, had collected nearly 1,600 flavors, due in part to their coding skills, and in part to sheer numbers, time, and motivation. Their results were
significantly better than mine.
Lots of the flavors they produced were sweet and fun. The kind you might find at a trendy ice cream or yogurt shop near you.
It’s Sunday
Cherry Poet
Brittle Cheesecake
Honey Vanilla Happy
hmmm
Bubble Bun
Triple Bun
Holy Lemon Monster
Cookies & Red Hot Lover
Vanilla Nettle
Sundana Rainbow
Team Cherry
Cherry Cherry Cherry
Chocolate Breath
Pig Nut
Bumble Cookie
Oh and Cinnamon
Other flavors sounded a bit weirder. Approach with caution.
Chocolate Finger
Rainbum
Caramel Book
Cupsie Core
Washing Chocolate
Peanut Cinnamon Budge
the United Bacon de Vanilla
Texas Boy Nut
Key de Smoke
Crackberry Pretzel
Middlenut
Salted Pie Breekberry Sundae
Texas Charlie Covered Stunt
Seat Strawberry
Butter Sweep
Bunny Out
Strawberry Moons
Pretzel Egg
Others: a quite worrisome level of ambiguity
Nuts with Mattery
Brown Crunch
Sticky Crumple
Cookies and Green
Sea Cheesecake
Mango Cats
Lemon Cream Grassplay
The 6th graders (the 11-12 year olds) tended to favor the very weird flavors.
Garamel Phankie Cookies & Peach
Cark Nutty Banana Croced Banana & Crazz
Vervette’s Caramel Borfle
Oatleak with Ninterbise
Barming French Cambarcot
Chocolate Blackbumple
Herbetures with The Chillin
Pie Lime Mint Thrippine
Praline Pelletral Liver
Banana Cookies & Jarange Core
Peach Peacket Marsh Blue
The 13-14 year olds, though? They preferred my first attempt, actually. And added a few of their own to the list.
Death
Brain
Orange Chocolate Killa
Blood Chip
Explosion Stick
Die White Pistachio
Funge Ecide
For the complete list of the coding class’s ice cream flavors, as well as a few PG-13 flavors that weren’t quite appropriate for the main blog, enter your email here.
