I’ve just finished up the initial version of a new project:

Garkov — Garfield + Markov chains.

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.

Examples: Speak - The suspense - Crazy about you

Right now it’s working from about 500 transcribed strips — just a fraction of the 10,000 that have been published by Jim Davis over the last thirty years — and is using nine different background strips. Both of those numbers will likely grow as I have the chance to do more transcribing and strip-preperation.

In principle, this can be applied just as well to other comic strips. In practice, the code should make it reasonably easy to do so as well, so I hope to at least test another strip sometime in the not too distant future.

[Update 6/9/08 - response to Garkov has been pretty great, enough so that I ended rewriting the db code underneath it on Saturday after a bunch of traffic crushed the will out of my original rinky-dink Perl DBM solution.

Also, I update the link up there to actually go to the site. Sheesh. Sorry about that.]