The Sitges Hackathon

The Hackathon is a traditional element of our Jamborees, so we did one in Sitges last week. Since our team has grown considerably we had different teams of people all working on a cool project. The purpose of the hackathon is to do a project and finish it in one day, but we always see that it takes a bit of time to publish what we've done. But now the results of the first project are in.

Douwe spend one day on comparing how similar languages are:

We've had phrasebooks in the Triposo apps for a long while now, based on the content from Wikitravel. So I went ahead and wrote a script to extract from those Wikitravel pages for each language the phonetic version of the words one to nine. I then calculated the similarity between all language pairs by calculating some sort of edit distance between the corresponding pairs of words.

Given the very straightforward approach used and the fact that all of this was done in just one day, the results are quite amazing. This is the image Douwe produced that shows how similar languages are:

Read the whole story on Douwe's blog