You probably played the game of telephone as a kid, but it's kind of boring as an adult. But what if we get the computer to play for us instead?
First, let's require some utilities from other notebooks, and define a few of our own.
// translations, powered by yandex.
// To use, make sure you set process.env.YANDEX_API_KEY to your own API key!
// You can sign up here: https://tech.yandex.com/keys/get/?service=trnsl
var yandex = require('notebook')('tonic/yandex-translation-api/1.1.0');
// Some common english phrases
var sayings = require('notebook')('capicue/sayings/2.0.0');
// Just a few niceties around Math.random()
var rand = require('notebook')('tonic/random/5.0.0');
function randomLanguage() {
var languageKeys = Object.keys(languages);
return languageKeys[rand(languageKeys.length)];
}
// Grab a random language from the supported languages.
var languages = await yandex.languages();
Alright, now we're ready. The basic idea is to start with a phrase and run it through a translation API a whole bunch of times, finally translating it back into the original language to see what we get.
// The core game
async function telephone(text, language = "en", steps = 10) {
return await step([{lang: language, text: text}]);
async function step(history) {
var last = history[history.length - 1];
var toLanguage = (history.length === steps) ?
history[0].lang :
randomLanguage();
var result = await yandex.translate(last.lang, toLanguage, last.text);
var results = history.concat([{text: result, lang: toLanguage}]);
if (history.length === steps)
return results.map(function(step){
return [step.text, languages[step.lang]];
});
return step(results);
}
}
var sentence = sayings.random();
await telephone(sentence);
Turn oil.
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