It’s hard to come up with ideas for Halloween costumes, especially when it seems like all the good ones are taken. And don’t you hate showing up at a party only to discover that there’s *another* pajama cardinalfish?
The most popular submitted costumes are the classics (42 witches, 32 ghosts, 30 pirates, 22 Batmans, 21 cats (30 incl sexy cats), 19 vampires, and 17 each of pumpkins and sexy nurses). There are about 300 costumes with “sexy” in their names; some of the most eyebrow-raising include sexy anglerfish, sexy Dumbledore, sexy golden pheasant, sexy eyeball, sexy Mothra, Sexy poop emoji, Sexy Darth Vader, Sexy Ben Franklin, Sexy TARDIS, Sexy Cookie Monster, and Sexy DVORAK keyboard. In the “technical challenge” department, we have costumes like Invisible Pink Unicorn, Whale-frog, Glow Cloud, Lake Michigan, Toaster Oven, and Garnet.
All this is to say that humans are very creative, and this task was going to be tricky for a neural network. The sensible approach would be to try to use a neural network that actually knows what the words mean – there are such things, trained by reading, for example, all of Google News and figuring out which words are used in similar ways. There’s a fun demo of this here. It doesn’t have an entry for “Sexy_Gandalf” but for “sexy” it suggests “saucy” and “sassy”, and for “Gandalf” it suggests “Frodo”, “Gollum”, and “Voldemort”, so you could use this approach to go from “Sexy Gandalf” to “Sassy Voldemort”.
I wanted something a bit weirder. So, I used a neural network that learns words from scratch, letter by letter, with no knowledge of their meaning, an open-source char-rnn neural network written in Torch. I simply dumped the 4500 Halloween costumes on it, and told the neural network to figure it out.
Early in the training process, I decided to check in to see how it was doing.
Sexy sexy Dombie Sexy Cat Sexy A stare Rowan Sexy RoR A the Rog Sexy Cot Sexy Purbie Lampire Poth Rat Sexy Por Man The Wombue Pombie Con A A Cat The Ran Spean Sexy Sexy Pon Sexy Dander Sexy Cat The Gull Wot Sexy Pot Hot
In retrospect, I should have expected this. With a dataset this varied, the words the neural network learns first are the most common ones.
I checked in a little later, and things had improved somewhat. (Omitted: numerous repetitions of “sexy nurse”). Still the only thing that makes sense is the word Sexy.
Sexy The Carding Ging Farbat of the Cower Sexy The Hirler A costume Sexy Menus Sexy Sure Frankenstein’s Denter A cardian of the Pirate Ging butter Sexy the Girl Pirate
By the time I checked on the neural network again, it was not only better, but astoundingly good. I hadn’t expected this. But the neural network had found its niche: costume mashups. These are actually comprehensible, if a bit hard to explain:
Punk Tree Disco Monster Spartan Gandalf Starfleet Shark A masked box Martian Devil Panda Clam Potato man Shark Cow Space Batman The shark knight Snape Scarecrow Gandalf the Good Witch Professor Panda Strawberry shark Vampire big bird Samurai Angel lady Garbage Pirate firefighter Fairy Batman
Other costumes were still a bit more random.
Aldonald the Goddess of the Chicken Celery Blue Frankenstein Dancing Bellyfish Dragon of Liberty A shark princess Statue of Witch Cupcake pants Bird Scientist Giant Two butter The Twin Spider Mermaid The Game of Nightmare Lightbare Share Bat The Rocky Monster Mario lander Spork Sand Statue of pizza The Spiding hood A card Convention Sailor Potter Shower Witch The Little Pond Spice of pokeman Bill of Liberty A spock Count Drunk Doll of Princess Petty fairy Pumpkin picard Statue of the Spice of the underworker
It still was fond of using made-up words, though. You’d be the only one at the party dressed as whatever these are.
Sparra A masked scorby-babbersy Scormboor Magic an of the foand tood-computer A barban The Gumbkin Scorbs Monster A cat loory Duck The Barboon Flatue doctor Sparrow Plapper Grankenstein The Spongebog Minional marty clown Count Vorror Rairol Mencoon A neaving hold Sexy Avical Ster of a balana Aly Huntle starber pirate
And it ended up producing a few like this.
Sports costume Sexy scare costume General Scare construct
The reason? Apparently someone decided to help out by entering an entire costume store’s inventory. (”What are you supposed to be?” “Oh, I’m Mens Deluxe IT Costume – Size Standard.”)
There were also some like this:
Rink Rater Ginsburg A winged boxer Ginsburg Bed ridingh in a box Buther Ginsburg Skeleton Ginsburg Zombie Fire Cith Bader Ginsburg
Because someone had entered about 50 variations on Ruth Bader Ginsberg puns (Ruth Tater Ginsberg, Sleuth Bader Ginsber, Rock Paper Ginsberg).
It invented some awesome new superheroes/supervillains.
Glow Wonder Woman The Bunnizer Ladybog Light man Bearley Quinn Glad woman robot Werewolf super Pun Super of a bog Space Pants Barfer buster pirate Skull Skywolk lady Skynation the Goddess Fred of Lizard
And oh, the sexy costumes. Hundreds of sexy costumes, yet it never quite got the hang of it.
Sexy Scare Sexy the Pumpkin Saxy Pumpkins Sexy the Pirate Sexy Pumpkin Pirate Sexy Gumb Man Sexy barber Sexy Gargles Sexy humblebee Sexy The Gate Sexy Lamp Sexy Ducty monster Sexy conchpaper Sexy the Bumble Sexy the Super bass Pretty zombie Space Suit sexy Drangers Sexy the Spock
You bet there are bonus names – and oh please go read them because they are so good and it was so hard to decide which ones to fit into the main article. Includes the poop jokes. You’re welcome.
