META: Who do you write like?

[Russ Allbery]

Arthur Spitzer <arspitzer at earthlink.net> writes:

> Here's a link to something that analyzes your writings and finds what
> famous writer your work resembles...

> http://iwl.me/

This unfortunately appears to be way less sophisticated than one might
hope based on the idea.  There seem to be only about 15-20 authors
possible for it to return, and it routinely gets works by those same
authors wrong.

Lots of people were hoping it was going to do more advanced textual
analysis, but it appears to be some sort of simple-minded statistical
vocabulary matching.  (It was also, at least for a time, advertising
ripoff "self-publishing" schemes to aspiring writers, but it's not clear
if that was actually the point of the site or just an ad rotation.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>