Your next craft beer might be named by a neural network

Researcher Janelle Shane has used AI to come up with names for paint colors, metal bands and guinea pigs in the past. She's even used it to generate wonderfully weird pickup lines. Now, she's turned her AI naming capabilities towards beer.

While writing about her neural network-generated paint color names, Gizmodo's Ryan Mandelbaum mentioned the issues craft brewers were having coming up with names for their beers -- issues that have at times led to legal action. Not long after that, with the help of a Gizmodo reader who put together a dataset of beer names culled from BeerAdvocate.com, Shane plugged the names into a neural network and out popped a bunch of new names for brewers to use.

Shane has posted a lot of the names on her blog, but there were so many, all of them wouldn't fit. Some of my favorites include Toe Deal, Heaven Cat, Sacky Rover, Borb! and I the Moon. If you want more, you can sign up through Shane's blog to get 100 additional names. "For these names I turned the neural network's creativity variable higher and got results that can be described mainly as ... interesting," she said on the blog. "And of course, there's the inevitable beer named Fart. (It's a stout. Of course it's a stout.)"

Image: lewisandquark.tumblr.com