Eureqa

As I was cleaning out my e-mail, I revisited an old (maybe 2009?) program from the Cornell Creative Minds Lab named Eureqa (and of course pronounced “eureka”). Well, “revisit” is the wrong word. Originally, I downloaded it, played with it briefly, and set it aside. And then when I had to reformat my hard drive recently—one of those incredibly annoying, time-consuming chores—I didn’t reinstall it. I can only play at being a geek, not actually be a geek.

Eureqa is, as described on its website, “a software tool for detecting equations and hidden mathematical relationships in your data. Its goal is to identify the simplest mathematical formulas which could describe the underlying mechanisms that produced the data.” And if past is prologue, can project into the future. Well, maybe.

For those of you with time on your hands and a penchant for data mining who somehow missed this piece of free software, you can download it here.