Career choices
Aug. 4th, 2005 05:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tahnanSophomore year, I took a computer science class--CS 15, Introduction to Program Design, I think it was called--and decided that (a) it was fun and (b) I didn't want to spend my life doing that.
In the last few days, when I needed a break from my dissertation, I've been idly working on a programming challenge from ITA Software, who'd advertised them on the T. I decided that most of them looked boring, but the one marked "(hard!)" was interesting, so I gave it a shot.
A few days later, I've cracked it. Not especially well; my program still produces vaguely English-like gibberish. (For instance: SILANISULU SIE LATA TT NAI CED TRE THE NENENG WIPEDO TTOXCH F RE DOF CO A THIN AST CRY ORBICUE HACHLINA I IN WOMAN COUGE? STHON' NOLIM IT DEA? UTWERE ST DO HACH AUS OLENENDA HINCILF MISEN ITOLERRY and so on. Actually, it's getting worse; it looked to look more like English: SNEW ORREN UN-IMAT;---COON CER TRE THE NINETED FID I SUE, HE IN. IFE CS. CRINE: OF CUSSO. FINE RUD'S MAN AND WOMAN CRI FEESER, ABOX ING ANGEL?--LODES STH JON CH ANA'AMSIDS FIENDLYGON DIGHONKIEST MEET PIASA. That's from the version with less differentiation of frequency in the dictionary files, one less training text, and a somewhat broken backtrack mechanism.) Anyway, not cracked well, but enough to get a string of 30 letters which looked like part of a sentence--seven words in the first message, six words in the second--and Googling the snippets I had was indeed enough to turn up the source of each.
I've employed a lot of little tricks along the way: training on texts, bigram and trigram frequency, dictionary matching, wordlength frequency, backtracking.
So the thing is, I still want to be a linguist. But sometimes, I miss the programming.
In the last few days, when I needed a break from my dissertation, I've been idly working on a programming challenge from ITA Software, who'd advertised them on the T. I decided that most of them looked boring, but the one marked "(hard!)" was interesting, so I gave it a shot.
A few days later, I've cracked it. Not especially well; my program still produces vaguely English-like gibberish. (For instance: SILANISULU SIE LATA TT NAI CED TRE THE NENENG WIPEDO TTOXCH F RE DOF CO A THIN AST CRY ORBICUE HACHLINA I IN WOMAN COUGE? STHON' NOLIM IT DEA? UTWERE ST DO HACH AUS OLENENDA HINCILF MISEN ITOLERRY and so on. Actually, it's getting worse; it looked to look more like English: SNEW ORREN UN-IMAT;---COON CER TRE THE NINETED FID I SUE, HE IN. IFE CS. CRINE: OF CUSSO. FINE RUD'S MAN AND WOMAN CRI FEESER, ABOX ING ANGEL?--LODES STH JON CH ANA'AMSIDS FIENDLYGON DIGHONKIEST MEET PIASA. That's from the version with less differentiation of frequency in the dictionary files, one less training text, and a somewhat broken backtrack mechanism.) Anyway, not cracked well, but enough to get a string of 30 letters which looked like part of a sentence--seven words in the first message, six words in the second--and Googling the snippets I had was indeed enough to turn up the source of each.
I've employed a lot of little tricks along the way: training on texts, bigram and trigram frequency, dictionary matching, wordlength frequency, backtracking.
So the thing is, I still want to be a linguist. But sometimes, I miss the programming.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-04 02:57 pm (UTC)> Program Design, I think it was called--and decided that (a) it was fun
> and (b) I didn't want to spend my life doing that.
That's exactly how I felt about 6.001.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-04 03:23 pm (UTC)Took me ten years to figure out (b).
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-04 04:04 pm (UTC)I'm reading this and thinking, "Oh, the basic programming class at my college was CS 15, too!" Oh. Right.
With a few tweaks, you could have convinced me that gibberish was a constructed language.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-04 08:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-06 07:03 pm (UTC)And they are not at all unrelated fields, depending on the type of programming you do. For a while, I had a job working on custom application programming languages. True, the grammars are much simpler, but it was still interesting.