If you were standing a long ways off, and didn't have binoculars, you might make the same mistake, at least until you waited an hour and none of the sheep moved. But of course in a picture, sheep never move.
I think it's inaccurate to say that it takes years to train a human brain to recognize sheep, or school buses, or whatever. Children take several years to learn to recognize thousands of objects (say, one type of object for every non-abstract noun we have in our language); but it only takes a few labeled exposures to each kind of object--maybe only one. And I think that holds of things one has only seen in a picture (you could probably identify a camel, or a duck-billed platypus, or a python, long before you went to the zoo and saw one). So there seems to be *something* very different about machine learning of images vs. human learning.
For that matter, dogs and cats, and even iguanas (at least according to their owners) recognize "owner" and "family member" very quickly. I'm not sure what kind of label they put on those people, but if you've seen a dog react to family members vs. strangers, you've seen this. In other words, object recognition is not a sign of great intelligence.
I believe (but don't quote me) that the neural nets in our brains (and for that matter, the brains of wolves) that are involved in sheep recognition are much larger than those in computers. --------- Little Red Riding Hood, you sure are looking good! You're everything a big bad wolf could want. -- Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs
And the Space Shuttle was just a minor addition to the Wright Brothers' Flyer (or if you prefer, to the Congreve rockets used against Fort McHenry in 1814).
My first coding was (I think) in 1969 (possibly 1970). It was a programming class at the University of Illinois (Chambana), and the programming languages were WATFOR (a dialect of FORTRAN IV) and PL/1. Punch cards, of course. I didn't do any programming for a living until 1982 (used Pascal to write a small database extraction program), then more or less continually since 1987 (Prolog, Lisp, C, and more recently Python, plus dabbling in things like Perl and TeX, and a few other more obscure languages). Obviously I'm not a contender, and even less so if the question is *continually* programming since some date.
Today I was coding in Lua and (Lua)LaTeX. Lua would not be my favorite language...
"modern cars have a LOT more parts in them than cars from 40 years ago but they also are demonstrably more reliable": Interesting point. I'm sure the reason for this is known by somebody, but it isn't known by me. I always assume it has to do with more QC in the factory, and that this QC effort was started by the Japanese in the 70s or so, and only taken up by Detroit (and the European mfgs) because they were loosing market share so badly. Can you (or someone) enlighten me? Why are cars more reliable now?
These engines are lighting off at the *front* of the rocket, in the sense that they're open end is in the direction of travel (down), correct? Naively I would think that the air blowing into them would tend to blow them out, like blowing air at a candle you're trying to light. I suppose when it's supersonic, there's a shock wave that prevents that; but the final burn is surely at subsonic speed. But maybe the engines are designed so that this doesn't happen, even subsonic?
I think what wwalker is saying is that going the opposite direction--from encoded to decoded--is impossibly ambiguous. This is particularly true of Semitic languages, where the root most often consists of three consonants. That implies that if you choose three letters, many permutations of those letters will be real roots. A few combinations, like 3 identical letters, or two identical letters at the beginning of the word (IIRC), can be ruled out, but most other combinations will be *some* root.
Yeah, I wish someone would put as much effort into decoding Linear A (the language of the Minoans), and showing it to be the ancestral language of some present-day languages (or some extinct languages). It's of course possible that it _doesn't_ represent the ancestor of some modern languages, in which case it will be forever unknowable. And there's not much of it, so even if it was a language we can reconstruct by other means, we might not be able to confirm it.
There are enough modern Turkic and Indian (both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian) languages around that we can reconstruct past forms of those languages--not to mention that many of them have been written for longer than English. So no, if it were a Turkic, Indo-Aryan or Dravidian language, someone would likely have figured it out by now.
Remember, this is supposed to be an English translation of a putative Hebrew text (and that done with Google Translate); it is not the Hebrew text, nor even an interlinear (word for word, same order as Hebrew) gloss. So the word order and sentence structure is irrelevant (as is the lack of punctuation, which is not a matter of sentence structure anyway). What bluegutang was saying (as I read him) is that the sentence does not seem like one you'd find *in a book on herbology*.
You might change your mind after you read this: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e..., and some of the links there. (Mark Liberman is, btw, a very senior computational linguist.) Google Translate is now quite capable of turning gibberish into meaningful output.
Yes, there are Mayan cities (and modern speakers of Mayan languages) in the states of Chiapas and Yucatan in Mexico, and (I'm guessing here) in states in between. I would think it shouldn't be hard to rule out Mayan languages for the Voynich ms, though, since their phonologies (and in particular their sets of phonemes) are quite different from typical European languages, or from Hebrew for that matter.
BTW, in case anyone is wondering, the Aztecs (up in central Mexico) also had "books" (usually called codices), but the consensus is that until the arrival of the Spaniards (particularly the Spanish missionaries), these did not contain written language, only pictures and pictograms. Given that the Mayans a few hundred miles to the SE of the Aztecs had true writing, I suppose that if the Spaniards hadn't shown up, Nahuatl (the Aztecs' language) would have eventually gotten written down.
As for the OP, I think the response here is quite correct: citation needed. Afaik, the Voynich ms has *not* been decoded (at least until now), and it almost certainly is not in any Amerindian language. And given that it's been dated to before 1440, and doesn't in the least resemble any Mayan or Aztec codices, it is highly unlikely to be in an Amerindian language, decoded or otherwise.
Also, a 6 year old kid has a grammar (in English, that includes both morphology--a relatively small amount, as languages go--and recursive syntax), and knows how to use it in both speaking and listening. Koko never had a grammar, and in that respect was no more than a two year old. Also, most six year olds in literate countries are well on their way to learning to read and write, and do arithmetic.
Slashdot Mirror
Because many Windows phones can't be upgraded to Windows 8--too little memory.
"Does your calculator know or understand mathematics? What about an abacus?" Oooh, for a moment I thought you were going to insult my slide rule.
If you were standing a long ways off, and didn't have binoculars, you might make the same mistake, at least until you waited an hour and none of the sheep moved. But of course in a picture, sheep never move.
I see you can copy-paste. Why can't you type new content? What progress have you made?
I think it's inaccurate to say that it takes years to train a human brain to recognize sheep, or school buses, or whatever. Children take several years to learn to recognize thousands of objects (say, one type of object for every non-abstract noun we have in our language); but it only takes a few labeled exposures to each kind of object--maybe only one. And I think that holds of things one has only seen in a picture (you could probably identify a camel, or a duck-billed platypus, or a python, long before you went to the zoo and saw one). So there seems to be *something* very different about machine learning of images vs. human learning.
For that matter, dogs and cats, and even iguanas (at least according to their owners) recognize "owner" and "family member" very quickly. I'm not sure what kind of label they put on those people, but if you've seen a dog react to family members vs. strangers, you've seen this. In other words, object recognition is not a sign of great intelligence.
I believe (but don't quote me) that the neural nets in our brains (and for that matter, the brains of wolves) that are involved in sheep recognition are much larger than those in computers.
---------
Little Red Riding Hood, you sure are looking good!
You're everything a big bad wolf could want.
-- Sam the Sham & The Pharaohs
And the Space Shuttle was just a minor addition to the Wright Brothers' Flyer (or if you prefer, to the Congreve rockets used against Fort McHenry in 1814).
GPUs
You're welcome, 99.
My first coding was (I think) in 1969 (possibly 1970). It was a programming class at the University of Illinois (Chambana), and the programming languages were WATFOR (a dialect of FORTRAN IV) and PL/1. Punch cards, of course. I didn't do any programming for a living until 1982 (used Pascal to write a small database extraction program), then more or less continually since 1987 (Prolog, Lisp, C, and more recently Python, plus dabbling in things like Perl and TeX, and a few other more obscure languages). Obviously I'm not a contender, and even less so if the question is *continually* programming since some date.
Today I was coding in Lua and (Lua)LaTeX. Lua would not be my favorite language...
"modern cars have a LOT more parts in them than cars from 40 years ago but they also are demonstrably more reliable": Interesting point. I'm sure the reason for this is known by somebody, but it isn't known by me. I always assume it has to do with more QC in the factory, and that this QC effort was started by the Japanese in the 70s or so, and only taken up by Detroit (and the European mfgs) because they were loosing market share so badly. Can you (or someone) enlighten me? Why are cars more reliable now?
These engines are lighting off at the *front* of the rocket, in the sense that they're open end is in the direction of travel (down), correct? Naively I would think that the air blowing into them would tend to blow them out, like blowing air at a candle you're trying to light. I suppose when it's supersonic, there's a shock wave that prevents that; but the final burn is surely at subsonic speed. But maybe the engines are designed so that this doesn't happen, even subsonic?
You work for the Department of Redundancy Department, right?
Although to be honest, the Vanguard rocket was heavier, and the satellite smaller.
Tom Lehrer? Who worked for the NSA in the mid-50s. But I'm sure you're right--he had help from his contemporary, Elvis.
You left out the part where, after faking the videos, he was taken up by aliens, to be re-united with Elvis.
Be there, or be square!
(probably before your time, but not before mine...)
I think what wwalker is saying is that going the opposite direction--from encoded to decoded--is impossibly ambiguous. This is particularly true of Semitic languages, where the root most often consists of three consonants. That implies that if you choose three letters, many permutations of those letters will be real roots. A few combinations, like 3 identical letters, or two identical letters at the beginning of the word (IIRC), can be ruled out, but most other combinations will be *some* root.
Yeah, I wish someone would put as much effort into decoding Linear A (the language of the Minoans), and showing it to be the ancestral language of some present-day languages (or some extinct languages). It's of course possible that it _doesn't_ represent the ancestor of some modern languages, in which case it will be forever unknowable. And there's not much of it, so even if it was a language we can reconstruct by other means, we might not be able to confirm it.
There are enough modern Turkic and Indian (both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian) languages around that we can reconstruct past forms of those languages--not to mention that many of them have been written for longer than English. So no, if it were a Turkic, Indo-Aryan or Dravidian language, someone would likely have figured it out by now.
Remember, this is supposed to be an English translation of a putative Hebrew text (and that done with Google Translate); it is not the Hebrew text, nor even an interlinear (word for word, same order as Hebrew) gloss. So the word order and sentence structure is irrelevant (as is the lack of punctuation, which is not a matter of sentence structure anyway). What bluegutang was saying (as I read him) is that the sentence does not seem like one you'd find *in a book on herbology*.
You might change your mind after you read this: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.e..., and some of the links there. (Mark Liberman is, btw, a very senior computational linguist.) Google Translate is now quite capable of turning gibberish into meaningful output.
Yes, there are Mayan cities (and modern speakers of Mayan languages) in the states of Chiapas and Yucatan in Mexico, and (I'm guessing here) in states in between. I would think it shouldn't be hard to rule out Mayan languages for the Voynich ms, though, since their phonologies (and in particular their sets of phonemes) are quite different from typical European languages, or from Hebrew for that matter.
BTW, in case anyone is wondering, the Aztecs (up in central Mexico) also had "books" (usually called codices), but the consensus is that until the arrival of the Spaniards (particularly the Spanish missionaries), these did not contain written language, only pictures and pictograms. Given that the Mayans a few hundred miles to the SE of the Aztecs had true writing, I suppose that if the Spaniards hadn't shown up, Nahuatl (the Aztecs' language) would have eventually gotten written down.
As for the OP, I think the response here is quite correct: citation needed. Afaik, the Voynich ms has *not* been decoded (at least until now), and it almost certainly is not in any Amerindian language. And given that it's been dated to before 1440, and doesn't in the least resemble any Mayan or Aztec codices, it is highly unlikely to be in an Amerindian language, decoded or otherwise.
Also, a 6 year old kid has a grammar (in English, that includes both morphology--a relatively small amount, as languages go--and recursive syntax), and knows how to use it in both speaking and listening. Koko never had a grammar, and in that respect was no more than a two year old. Also, most six year olds in literate countries are well on their way to learning to read and write, and do arithmetic.
So you're a real live Thermian? Wow, I'd like to shake tentacles with you!