Ian enjoys reading, playing video games, hiking, and sailing. He plays the piano and has been involved in school publications. Ian would love to become a computer game designer someday. "I have some fresh ideas for great games that I think would be helpful for the industry," says Ian.
His mentor is Mrs. Karen Lemmon, his science teacher. Ian notes that "she has always encouraged the pursuit of science."
Ian's father shared an article with him that discussed how the language of the text in a computer file could be determined without opening it. According to the article, using a compression algorithm to compare the file to a known file could potentially do this. The article suggested that this technique could also be used to determine the authorship of a file. A compression algorithm shrinks a file by either reducing or eliminating repetitive data. To perform the test, smaller text files of unknown origin are attached to the compressed files. The resulting files are then recompressed. The more alike the two files are, the smaller the resulting file is. Therefore, the best compression ratio should be for a comparison of two works by the same author. Ian was interested in testing this technique while trying to answer the question of whether William Shakespeare is the author of the literature that has been attributed to him.
Ian used the Internet to collect texts by many authors. He ran the texts through a compression algorithm to see whether he could identify the author of a file without looking at the file. This worked with 100 percent success. His second test was to see if he could answer the question regarding Shakespeare's work. Ian's research indicated that there is doubt regarding the authorship of Shakespeare's work and that there is evidence suggesting that Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's contemporary, was the author. Ian took samples of work attributed to Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other authors. Using the compression algorithm, he believes his tests provide strong evidence that the plays attributed to Shakespeare were written by Christopher Marlowe.
