Brown CS Blog

by Eric Xia

This summer, on a grant from Brown's Startup Fellowship program, I developed www.word.golf with Julian Beaudry, a fellow CS undergraduate. Throughout the last couple months, we have done our best to follow a spirit of inquiry, creating a project which challenges the imagination while remaining a sense of familiarity and playfulness.

Word.golf is played by clicking on a neighbor from a grid of words, semantically centered around a single focal word. Your goal is to leap from one word to another in as few jumps as possible. The catch is that every connection between words, no matter how far apart they seem, can be traversed in exactly two jumps. The words we present to the user are not obvious synonyms. Instead, the terms we present are interlinked statistically, as they cooccur in written text, resulting in the most natural sense of the word. From wheel, one can leap to motor or brake, but also rubberneck and fishtailing. Through the neighbors on which these judgements are made, we expose the heart of language, the heads and tails we employ in natural and everyday speech.

To read the rest of this story and explore the latest issue of Conduit, the annual Brown CS magazine, click here.