The glow from the wall mounted television enveloped Farooq and Viral like a halo. Like oil-slicked snakes wires ran from the base of the screen down the wall and into the surge protector and USB-C hub Farooq had setup on the credenza. Farooq double-clicked his mouse, licked his lips like a quarterback about to take a snap in the red zone. Viral smelled the singe of water burning between glass and plastic from the single-serving percolator to Farooq's left.

Looking toward Farooq, Viral saw the cybernetic future of man. The glare from the television reflected hard off Farooq's glasses, casting his eyes behind a truculent, blue light. The source of illumination was the white expanse of a graphical table on the screen, it's rows filled with coded syntax rife with anachronistic punctuation - periods, colons, single quotes. Though Viral was no stranger to Jupyter notebooks he was also little more than an acquaintance. While the syntax of the table was familiar enough after five years of self taught Python programming, the larger narrative of it's lexicon lived on an elevated plane. In over his head or not Viral had no choice but to crack the cipher of Osterhauf.

Farooq picked up mid-sentence as if his inner monologue with his neural net had been shared with Viral all along. "The thing is we have to be sure not to overtweak the weights with such a sparse training set."

Viral looked over his shoulder for someone who may have understood what Farooq said. The only other person in the room was a heavily snoring and sedated Dr. Hackman. "Are you talking to me?" Viral asked.

"I thought you wanted to learn how to craft a neural net," Farooq snapped.

Viral apologized. "I do, sorry. It's just all a bit overwhelming. What training set?"

Farooq sighed, removed his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. "What college are you at again?"

"Brown," Viral said.

Replacing his glasses Farooq shrugged. "Okay, so we will start like you are a kindergartner."

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Viral wondered if he should be offended, but Farooq's tutelage barrelled along.

"A neural network learns patterns that map the input to the output of a training set. Once the network has memorized the pattern, it remembers it as a collection of numbers called weights. When we introduce new, unseen data into the neural network it uses those weights to predict the output according to the pattern that it has learned."

"And if the training data is sparse then the pattern may not be accurate," Viral said.

Farooq's eyes widened and he smiled. "Not bad for a second-tier Ivy," he said.

Before Viral could take offense, Farooq continued. "Now, we can tweak the weights to better match the training input to it's output but we do so at the cost of narrowing the neural networks, um, how do you say...magic," Farooq said.

And to Viral as close to magic as he'd ever seen is what it was. Using only real numbers between zero and one within a collection of lists inside lists, Farooq's convolutional neural network would spin from thin air the missing intent from Tyler's code.

Catching his breath from his dip into awe, Viral asked Farooq about the training data set.

"I split the logs Monica gave us of Tyler's broken-up code into two batches. The first batch we will use as the training set," Farooq said.

"But what will we compare it to if Tyler's logs are incomplete?" Viral asked.

Farooq snapped his fingers and pointed his chin toward the screen. Using his mouse he moved the cursor to a browser tab set to a GitHub repository. "I wrote a script to crawl the GitHub graph for all repos matching a regex for specific keywords."

"What keywords?" Viral asked.

"The ones that Tyler already used in his code," Farooq said smiling, but Viral didn't follow.

Oroboros, Farooq called it. The serpent eating its tail. Farooq planned to use Tyler's unfinished code as the codex to reveal it's missing syntax amongst millions of GitHub repositories.

"By seeding our training set with a class of code bases that potentially match what we are missing in Tyler's we've effectively increased the diversity of our options by a factor of five," Farooq concluded.

"But won't all that data potentially act as noise pulling us further from what could have been Tyler's intent?"

"There, there, second tier," Farooq said, patting the back of Viral's hand. "Think about it like ... this is the primordial ooze. The more random elements and molecules we have swimming around the greater the chance for serendipitous encounters."

Viral nodded, beginning to understand. "Like chaos..."

"Like life," Farooq added.

Like entropy, Viral thought.