I decided to write a neural network from scratch and I want it to generate names. This is the first time ever I’m doing something related to machine learning.
Before generating anything, some assumptions are needed:
- the names will be up to 12 characters long
- all of the names will be in lower case
- every character will belong to the English alphabet
Here’s the plan:
Outputs random A trained characters neural network ------------------- ------------- --------------/ \ | generator | -----> | classifier | <is it a name?> | ------------- --------------\ / ------------------- /\ yes / \ no / \ <output the name> <------- \ <loop back> The neural network itself will look something like that: 
After entering a string (properly converted) a single value will be outputted – the certainty of the network that the given string is a valid name.
This is the site I got my idea from: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jxb/INC/nn.html.
Now. Does my plan make sense? Are there better methods to generate believable names? Please tell me if I overlooked something.
