I have decided to pursue a degree. I sort of played with this years ago, and didn’t follow up. There were many reasons, and that was many years ago.

Now, the stars have aligned, and it’s time. I have always been interested in artificial intelligence and the idea of getting a computer to process language like a human being. The gold standard for whether anyone has succeeded at this is called the Turing Test. It’s a simple test. Put a human on one terminal, and a computer on the other (so an independent human judge can’t see the physical difference). Then have the judge talk to both terminals. If the human judge can’t tell the difference between the human on one terminal and the computer on the other, then the computer can, for all practical purposes, be said to have intelligence.

Who am I to think I can do this? Well, nothing special, but I would really like to contribute to the field, and learn how the work is coming along so far. Maybe I won’t personally be responsible for it, but I’d really like to be part of the experts who are working on it.

So, I’ve decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics. I have a long ways to go; I don’t even have a Bachelor’s degree yet. I’ve just completed a few credits at a community college. Not exactly old school ivy league stuff. But I’m not really trying to prove anything. This isn’t about whether “I’ve still got it” or something like a mid-life crisis.

I don’t think I would have succeeded at this as well if I’d started when I was younger. I didn’t have the ability to avoid pursuing every little thing that interested me, like I can know.

First things first. I’ve talked to the local university and the local community college. My employer has great educational reimbursement benefits. The hard part now is just scheduling classes and giving myself enough time to do it. I’ll post the non-technical parts of my progress here, and the more technical parts will go onto Code Charm.