The course typically attracts students majoring in the study of religion, who are learning the language to further their research into Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Reading through her class list, however, Mills found that of six of the 40 enrolled students were actually computer science majors. "I'm always excited when there are students from an unexpected place," she says. The lingual connection between Sanskrit and computer science, it turns out, has been the subject of interest for quite some time. The first well-known publication that examined the relationship was in 1985, when NASA scientist Rick Briggs published a research paper in which he argued that the 3,500-year-old language was the best candidate for programming artificial intelligence technology – namely because of its adherence to rigid grammatical rules.