A company is using artificial intelligence to generate unique beer names

Craft brewers are running out of beer names. NPR reports that companies are having to compromise over shared a name, or getting in Twitter fights over them.

Even lawyers are settling spats over imagery, or hop puns like Hopscotch and Bitter End.

So, rather than relying on our boring human brains, why not use artificial intelligence to come up with fresh new names? That’s what scientist Janelle Shane (who uses artificial intelligence for this purpose frequently) decided to do. The results: an IPA called Yamquak. A Cherry Trout Stout. The Fire Pipe Amber Ale.

Shane says she used a data set of “hundreds of thousands” of beer names in over 90 different styles, from Beer Advocate’s website. She then used this data to train a neural network, which is a computer program that imitates datasets, to produce the list.

“It worked,” said Shane on her blog. “The neural network produced unique names that were plausible, or weirdly awesome, or so outlandish that they sounded like the sort of beer you could only buy after a multi-day scavenger hunt involving hang gliding, codebreaking, and Fairbanks, Alaska.”