Research in computational methods has focused on phylogenetic taxonomy, cognate recognition, phone alignment, and even identification of correspondence sets, but more work is to be done in computer-assisted modeling of diachronic sound change. An adaptation of A*, a path-finding algorithm relying on cost and distance-to-goal heuristics, was used in combination with data from comparative dictionaries to model sound change applying typologically-based predictions about sound change. Typological data serves here as a quantitative proxy for factors driving sound change. As long as the data to be modeled include only sound changes, both unconditioned or conditioned by contact with other phones (coarticulatory effects), but exclude any unconditioned mergers or classes of phones not included in the sample (e.g., click consonants), the algorithm can, for automatically generated data, model a proto-language lexical reconstruction and the ordered sequences of conditioned sound changes required to produce the input reflexes.