On 2/12/2014 12:46 PM, omd wrote:
On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 9:42 AM, Nich Del Evans <nich...@gmail.com> wrote:
I
also agree that they can imitate recursion to an even more limited extent.
Well, if a computer program can manage to parse a deeply nested
sentence, I expect it could proceed to manipulate it with far more
ease than a human. e.g. if your "equivalent in meaning" sentence went
10 levels down.
As for Google Translate, here are some alternate languages:
Spanish: "I am a green man" is a meaning equivalent to "I am the green
time and a man."
French: "I'm a Green Man" has the same meaning: "I am green and a man."
German: "I am a green man" has the same meaning "I am green and a man."
Italian: "I am a green man" is equivalent to the meaning of 'I am both
green and a man. "
1/4 basically correct, 2/4 grammatically incorrect but not nonsensical
(and we shouldn't mean to exclude people with bad grammar :). You'd
know more than I, but I guess Google Translate's use of statistical
rather than rule-based translation deals better with the more
ambiguous sentences found in most texts at the cost of making this use
case look particularly bad.
I think we got off mark here though. To at least a minor extent we can
both agree computers can emulate recursion and rephrasing. But I don't
think many agree that they can emulate original thought. In fact, if
they had original thought we'd probably have no objection to them
playing. This revision was a response to the argument that a dog can
communicate original thoughts, which seems true enough. But while a dog
has original thoughts, it has very limited rephrasing and no recursion.
So unless Lilly is hooked up to a machine that can then rephrase and
recursively refer to Lilly's thoughts, these new restrictions should be
sufficient. Otherwise, I see no reason that a dog-machine combination
shouldn't be allowed to play, though I doubt they would do much.
