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Computer Learns Language By Playing Games
Frans Faase writes "By basing its strategies on the text of a manual, a computer infers the meanings of words without human supervision. The paper Learning to Win by Reading Manuals in a Monte-Carlo Framework (PDF) explains how a computer program succeeds in playing Civilization II using the official game manual as a strategy guide. This manual uses a large vocabulary of 3638 words, and is composed of 2083 sentences, each on average 16.9 words long. By this the program improves it success rate from 45% to 78% in playing the game. No prior knowledge of the language is used."
Computers have always been good for doing tedious jobs that people don't want to do.
Like reading manuals.
in schools? Get kids reading decent manuals (text-books) and perhaps they may actually learn something and find they can do decent things with the new-found knowledge.
This probably dates myself quite accurately, but pretty much, Infocom taught me how to read and type.
It has its side effects, saying "inv" when I look in my wallet, saying "save" before I do something dangerous, but overall it worked pretty well.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Indeed, I make daily use of the differences between a partisan, ranseur, glaive, guisarme, glaive-guisarm, guisarm-glaive, lucern hammer, military fork, volge, etc.
As far a children learning to swear I learned from my dad. One of my first complete and correct sentences was "Oh fuck this!". I was about one and a half years old and trying to put together a roof rake (it was the summer) and there was a screw and wing nut to hold it together and I just couldn't get it together. So after a little bit I got frustrated and with a piece of the rake in each hand held it up in the air proclaimed "Oh fuck this!", threw it to the ground, and stomped off.
Time to offend someone