Slashdot Mirror

Reminds me of when Skylab fell to earth, dumping pieces of itself over Western Australia. The local president of the town council, Mervin Andre, gave the Director of NASA a littering ticket when chunks of the disintegrating space station dropped over the area southeast of Perth. The ticket remains unpaid to this day, although the council later waived the fine anyway.

I think we're a darn sight closer to steps 2 and 3 than number 1. I can serously see step two happening anytime soon, we are a lot closer in this field of AI than any other. Step 3 would probably take a few months once step 2 is complete- there's not really much more work there is there? As for the Turing test, it never will be passed using current techniques, all of which (with the possible exception of MegaHAL) have been bigger glorified verions of ELIZA, which came out in the fifties. Sure you say it just needs a new approach and we'll manage it- well nobody's managed anything since then so my hopes are very much not up.

In addition, this is the same company which is heading up the contest mentioned on slashdot many moons ago. Essentially they want to see if your algorithm can beat all commers and pay you some hush money if it can...personally, if I won I would take my algorithm and start my own company.

Interestingly enough, from Jason Hutchens' website:

I'm currently the Chief Scientist here at Ai. Working here is like being a character in a Neal Stephenson novel. We're making child machines which can learn language in the same way as human infants do. We're based in a huge mansion in Israel. We watch movies in the atomic bomb shelter. We jack in to the network using wireless technology. It's cool, man.

So, in fact, the creator of MegaHal is in fact the brains behind this outfit!

Remember what happened to MegaHal when the public was invited to "educate" it? The result was an utterly, tediously, foulmouthed bot. However I must confess to teaching it that Smurfette had a foot fetish.

The smallest alphabet is that of Solresol, with 7. The "letters" (or segmental phonemes, if you're being picky) in Solresol may be represented in several ways, not just written, and it's fundamental to the language that they're all identical. It's often called a "musical language", because of their ancestry from the Western chromatic scale, but they have equally valid written and spoken forms, even to the tone deaf. Solresol is interesting for several reasons, although I'd not claim that it has a particular significant future.

• First wholly invented language to achieve any sort of widespread acceptance.
• First "interlangua", the notion of a translation intermediary language capable of expressing all other language translations x->y as the sequence of x->solresol and solresol->y.
• First language to formally separate semantics and encoding, i.e. the musical phoneme is exactly equivalent to the written phoneme (or that phoneme expressed in arranged pebbles, or smell-o-vision). As a result, it's entirely phonetic, but the distinction goes a long way beyond that.

And of course, it's in Unicode too.

On the downside, it's just French with squeaky noises.

Hawaiian is probably the "naturally evolved" human language with the shortest alphabet.