Neural network-named tomatoes you won’t find at the farmer’s market

As gardeners know, a tomato is not just a tomato. They come in all shapes, sizes, and especially colors, from tiny red gems to big and purplish brown to pear-shaped with zebra stripes. And their tastes and textures vary wildly as well, with some sweet and soft, some tough-skinned and tart, and some dense and destined for processing. These varieties all have names, of course, and good names are at a premium. Darren Abbey, who runs the blog The Biologist Is In, breeds new tomatoes and needs to name them from time to time. He gave me a list of 11,629 existing names, ranging from the highly experimental (Rts-119) to the classic (Sungold). I used these names to train a recurrent neural network, which is a kind of algorithm that learns patterns that let it imitate the data it sees. Could it learn to produce plausible tomato names? Yes, as it turns out! On Darren’s blog post you can read his expert opinion, but the verdict is: these are totally usable names. Floranta Sweet Lightning Speckled Boy Flavelle Pinkery Plum Market Days Fancy Bell Mountain Gem Garden Sunrise Honey Basket Cold Brandy Sun Heart Flaminga Sunberry Special Baby Golden Pow However, not ALL the names were plausible. These are a lot weirder. Birdabee Sandwoot Shampy Bear Plum The Bango Grannywine Sun Burger Bungersine First No.4 Smoll Pineapple The Ball Golden Cherry Striped Rock Eggs Old German Baby Frankster Black Bumbertime Ranny Blue Ribber Adoly Pepp Of The Wonder Cherry, End Students Small Of The Elf Champ German Ponder Pearly Pemper Green Zebra Pleaser Flute First These *seem* weird, but they aren’t actually all that weird for tomato names. There are at least 50 oxheart tomatoes in the original dataset. Matt’s Sandwich Indigo Tree Sun Burger Striped Hollow Potato Leaf Lelly’s Yellow Stuffers Terra Pink Strain Greek Boar Ton’s Oxheart Babla’s German Paste Mortgage Lifter, Honey Blues These however? These tomatoes don’t sound promising. Speckled Garfech Green Dork Cluster Gall Shirve’s Gigant Bullburk True Grub Black Crape Caraball Roma Wasting Star Scar Giant Bug Beauty Banana Placente Bananana Stoner Speckled Bake Ruck Green Boor Wonder Bagg Sun Bung Bellende Bolosavyi Scarling West Colon Panterosa San Blue Tard Red Krap Shart Delight Solad Piss For more in-depth analysis of these names, check out Darren’s blog. I also trained a neural net on fruit names earlier - read the results here. And this post’s bonus content is well worth checking out, because not only does it contain many more tomato names, but I also tried an experiment where I trained a neural net first on tomato names, and then on the names of metal bands. The results were glorious, including such wonders as: Angels of Saucing Serpent Green Market Death Sweet Sever Devil Potato Large Death Fill out the form here and I’ll email you more ill-advised tomato names.