Read Online vicarious.ly by Emilio Cecconi - Free Book Online

on one algorithm. Now it was time to show him what I developed. “Professor, I’ve loved your course so far. I want to show you an algorithm I developed. It’s called Eden,” I said. I started to sweat. I had been spending a good amount of my free time glued to my computer and textbooks trying to turn language into a series of computations that could be used to show how language has evolved geographically throughout the planet over time.
    “Jake you have my full attention,” He said.
    I opened up a file that contained the Eden algorithm.
    Before I began college it was always my dream to be a programmer like Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak. I would spend nights tinkering with a computer making programs. By the time I went into highschool, I was writing algorithms because it allowed me to compete in programming competitions. I loved computers. That is until I fell in love with language which led me to study linguistics in general. Then I fell in love with words which led me to focus on philology.
    As the algorithm was running, I was explaining to Professor Craig my background on programming algorithms. In advance, I apologized for using some of his Natural Language algorithms that powered Eden. Before I showed him some results that I found, I asked if he had any questions for me. Professor Craig just looked at me, half like I was crazy and half in bewilderment.
    I told him that Eden was a set of algorithms that tracked semantic reasoning, parsing, classification and structural changes in languages over time. Each book or piece of writing that I had loaded into the program had a date, language name, and geographic region associated with it. What Eden did was to calculate the formation of complex sentences, verbs, and idea structure as a formula. It was something I hacked together in a couple of months so a lot of my calculations weren’t quite scientific. But I was able to show how language structure has evolved consistently through time. Without going into the details, I argued that I thought I came up with enough preliminary data to show that there is a possibility that all the languages spoken on this planet came from a single tribe that once lived on this planet.
    I knew Professor Craig must have thought I was insane, but he kept listening to me in that coffee shop for over an hour. By the time I was done showing him the work that I created, it was night. I asked him if he had any questions. He leaned back on his chair and ordered another coffee. I started to get nervous. It was just then that I realized that all of his graduate students were around the table looking at me with their eyebrows raised. They had been there for the past two hours.
    “Jake, I’d like you to do research with me. I’d like to see what you’ve done. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ll let you use any of my work and you can own the research you do. I’ve been looking for something like this my entire life.”
    It was a start of an amazing mentorship. I spent the summer in Boston working with Professor Craig. I spent months cleaning up the algorithms in Eden. I also started adding more and more written sources to the Eden project. Eventually, I struck up a deal with my university to be able to access all of their online texts to analyze language structure.
    In the course of the next year, I turned Eden into a massive machine learning project. Eden’s algorithms would change based on the results it found. Eden would automatically scan any texts my university owned and use that as a part of its internal language base.
    As I continued to build out Eden, I kept working under Professor Craig. He helped me publish results based on the findings I saw on Eden. He also helped me talk at conferences. Eventually I made Eden available to anybody who wanted to use it on the internet.
    The attention was great. I felt like I was progressing with my life at such an amazing pace. I was totally engrossed with this project which I thought could get me