I’d like to generate a pseudo-random string that is derived from English words, as opposed to just a sequence of random characters. It doesn’t need to be guaranteed unique, just “random enough”.

I’ve written an output macro that does this using ^pick(~adjectivelist), ^pick(~nounlist), and %rand, which produces strings like the following:

This is exactly what I’m looking for, but I’ve noticed that ^pick() is returning the same words a lot of the time, despite using very large concepts as the input (adjectives and nouns).

When I ran the output macro 50-odd times, the adjectives “criminal”, “similar”, and “snowy” showed up in almost half of the outputs.

My output macro is as follows:

After looking at the structure of ~adjectivelist, it’s clear why certain words are coming up more than others. The frequently-occurring words appear very high up in the tree, and belong to concepts where there are only a few words (e.g. “criminal” is the only word in ~relational_adjectives, which is a direct child of ~adjectivelist).

So, it appears that I need a ‘flatter’ concept from which to ^pick(). Is there a way to flatten a concept? I don’t imagine this would be a quick operation, so I could do it once and store the result in a new ~flatadjectivelist concept if required.

Unless there’s a better way to achieve what I’m doing?

I used :allmembers ~adjectivelist to flatten the concept, then copied the words into my own concept ~flatadjectivelist. Did the same with the nouns. Works well now.

Still interested in any other/better ways if anyone has any.

that’s a fine way. 

CS does not try to flatten it on the fly as that would be potentially expensive in CPU and memory. So it walks the top level, randomly picking a member. If that turns out to be a concept, it then walks that set and randomly picks that member and so on.

Inspired by Rohan Listons macro I build a pet name, nickname Generator.

I tried a concept with all possible pet names (22000) in alphabetical order.

I tried ^pick(~petname) many times but got only names starting with letter A or letter B.

In the concept ~petname Names with Letter C start at position 3406. ^pick() In seems to work fine with smaller concepts

Maybe ^pick is not working randomly on very large concepts. Any ideas are appreciated.