So What's All This Then?
It's a thing that randomly generates a name that (most of the time) sounds like an actual Cornish place name, and, honestly, it fucking works! I'm still kind of amazed how good these are. It's also fairly simple: I took a list of just over 8000 Cornish place names and counted how often each letter (also space & apostrophe) follows each combination of the previous 3 letters. This is what the data from which names are generated consists of: a big table of letter combination frequencies, e.g.
...
tam: {a: 11, e: 3, p: 8}
tan: {" ": 2, a: 2, b: 1, d: 1, f: 2, g: 1, l: 1, n: 5, s: 1, t: 9, w: 2, [end of name]: 1}
tap: {h: 2, p: 1}
tar: {" ": 1, a: 1, e: 2, g: 2, l: 3, n: 3, r: 3, t: 3}
...
etc.
But is Cornwall even a real place?
Amazingly yes, it is. I know, I was surprised too, but it turns out I've actually been living there for over 20 years. Cornwall is a county of England in the UK and it's the home of the Cornish language (which used to be spoken a lot, then extincted in 1777 with the death of Dolly Pentreath, but now has undergone a small revival and has 500-600 speakers, which is neat) which is why there's loads of fun names everywhere.
So is this just a worse version of an AI*?
Well, yes and no. In a very simplified sense it works similarly to an LLM (kind of; not really), though it's far more basic (and efficient). And no, it's far superior to an AI*. The data used for this consists of publicly available place names, this doesn't flood the internet with slop and misinformation (though I'm trusting you to not go around pretending these are real places), this isn't destroying the job security of artists, and each click of the button doesn't bring the world 10% closer to climate armageddon.
* AI doesn't exist (but it will ruin everything anyway)