Curiosities

Not everything needs a grant. These are the side-quests: I made them out of curiosity, they each taught me something, and they are too much fun to leave off the record.

Deciphering Beanish

Thirty-five utterances of a language that exists only in an xkcd comic — Beanish, from Randall Munroe’s “Time.” I mapped its script to Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics and worked backward from a character’s broken English to reconstruct a grammar. Statistical methods built for millions of words, applied to a corpus you could fit on a napkin. It even helped me land a post-doc, once.

github.com/tresoldi/beanish · an essay is on its way

Runestaves, visualised

An interactive visualisation of the evolution of runestaves — the kind of ambiguous, high-cardinality glyph data that started me down the row2vec road, and part of the broader cultural-evolution-of-texts work.

github.com/tresoldi/runestaves_viz

A Bloom filter in COBOL

Because someone had to. A probabilistic set-membership structure implemented in COBOL — equal parts programming-history homage and act of stubbornness.

github.com/tresoldi/cobol_bloom

Tafl games

The ancient Nordic family of asymmetric board games, approached with chess-programming techniques — minimax, evaluation functions, and the peculiar problem of a game where the two sides have entirely different goals. A recurring sport.

An Erdős number of 5

Through Johann-Mattis List → Alexandros Stamatakis → Yishay Mansour → Noga Alon → Paul Erdős. Collaborative distance is its own small pleasure.

Egyptology, on the side

An amateur’s fascination with Ancient Egyptian and Coptic — old scripts, old data, and the same decipherment instinct that Beanish scratches, pointed at something real.