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Generating Realistic-Looking Data With Markov Chains

Phil Factor shows how to use Markov chain generation in T-SQL to generate realistic-looking country names:

How did we do this? We started with a table that took each word, added two spaces at the beginning and a |, followed by two subsequent spaces, at the end. This allowed us to map the frequency of each three-letter combination in a collection of words. Any language is made up of common combinations of characters with a few wild exceptions. For words to look right, they must follow this distribution. This distribution will change in various parts of a word, so you need all this information.

So what would happen if, instead of feeding the name of countries into the batch, we do the names of people?

My favorite name from the list was Kuwatian Samoa.