Hi all! My brother and I did a little study on the Book of Mormon back in 2014 that proposed a connection between the Book of Mormon and a pseudo-biblical book published in 1816 called "The Late War".

We developed some helpful tools for this kind of research at that time, but I think the most valuable is probably "BomDB", which is a command-line tool that provides easy access to many of the early editions of the Book of Mormon in a format that is easy to send to whatever algorithm you clever researchers and computer scientists might cook up:

https://github.com/wordtreefoundation/bomdb

Today, I updated this tool to Ruby 3.x and made it easy to install again if you have Ruby on your computer system (just gem install bomdb).

The reason for the update just now is that I've been curious about vector databases and ChatGPT lately. I think there is going to be another rich period of research in the next few years as we unlock semantic capabilities that are much more robust than the simple "4-gram" based language model we used back in 2014.

LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT, Anthropic, WizardLM, etc.) and vector databases (e.g. Qdrant, ChromaDB) are a dream for drawing possible connections between sources available to founders of the LDS church, and what they eventually produced as written works.

We're entering an era when computers don't just match text, but nearly understand it like we do. And they can do it repeatably, in a way most people will be able to query themselves to find answers if they want them. Exciting times ahead, I think!