...the flesh is weak" comes out as "The meat is rotten, but the wine's great".
Seems like I have to repeat myself over and over again, since this is an urban legend. According to MACHINE TRANSLATION: An Introductory Guide:
The `spirit is willing' story is amusing, and it really is a pity that it is not true. However, like most MT `howlers' it is a fabrication. In fact, for the most part, they were in circulation long before any MT system could have produced them (variants of the `spirit is willing' example can be found in the American press as early as 1956, but sadly, there does not seem to have been an MT system in America which could translate from English into Russian until much more recently --- for sound strategic reasons, work in the USA had concentrated on the translation of Russian into English, not the other way round). Of course, there are real MT howlers. Two of the nicest are the translation of French avocat (`advocate', `lawyer' or `barrister') as avocado, and the translation of Les soldats sont dans le café as The soldiers are in the coffee. However, they are not as easy to find as the reader might think, and they certainly do not show that MT is useless.
BTW, since this book is no longer available in the stores, the whole contents is placed online. I recommend reading this book to anyone who is interested into the subject of MT. It really is a nice introduction into the subject.
So, why doesn't someone at Microsoft call up the vendor of those apps and let them know that the next service pack will break their apps in this very specific fashion?
Because, when Microsoft break apps with a new release (be it a service pack, or new version), who do you think is going to be blamed for that by the consumers?
Let's say that Bob uses Stamp Collector Deluxe on his Windows 98 box. Bob decides to upgrade to XP, but unknown to him, Stamp Collector Deluxe relies on some undocumented feature of Windows 98, which does not work on XP. The result: Stamp Collector Deluxe does not work anymore, and Bob blames Microsoft, because it used to run fine on 98.
When you decide on being the most popular OS in the world, compatibility is everything, and Raymond Chen, the person the grandparent poster was referring to knows this better that most of us combined.
I hate to repeat myself, but this is an urban legend. According to MACHINE TRANSLATION: An Introductory Guide:
The `spirit is willing' story is amusing, and it really is a pity that it is not true. However, like most MT `howlers' it is a fabrication. In fact, for the most part, they were in circulation long before any MT system could have produced them (variants of the `spirit is willing' example can be found in the American press as early as 1956, but sadly, there does not seem to have been an MT system in America which could translate from English into Russian until much more recently --- for sound strategic reasons, work in the USA had concentrated on the translation of Russian into English, not the other way round). Of course, there are real MT howlers. Two of the nicest are the translation of French avocat (`advocate', `lawyer' or `barrister') as avocado, and the translation of Les soldats sont dans le café as The soldiers are in the coffee. However, they are not as easy to find as the reader might think, and they certainly do not show that MT is useless.
BTW, since this book is no longer available in the stores, the whole contents is placed online, though the server appears down right now. I recommend reading this book to anyone who is interested into the subject of MT. It really is a nice introduction into the subject.
I think you mention some interesting points, but there are some points where I think you are wrong:
3) Succinct context menus. Context menus should have no more than a half a dozen entries, and should only function as shortcuts for functionality accessible from the "common access point."
Though it is not quite the same, this sounds an awfull lot like the menu-hiding 'feature' in MS Office. It's one of the first things I always turn off;). In fact, it could be even worse if - depending on the context your're working in - menus randomly appear and disappear. One of the laws in graphical user interfaces is: keep it consistent. Apple does this perfectly: in MacOS the first two menus have always been and shall always be "File" and "Edit". Hiding and showing menu's and other widgets is not very consistent, and distracts the user.
4) No more windows. Overlapping windows are just confusing and require too much user intervention. A next gen GUI should be based on a full-screen application mechanism. For the relatively few times when more than one application needs to be visible at the same time, mechanisms need to be provided to facillitate this. This is an example of optimizing for the common case.
I think the maximize window functionality found in all of todays GUIs does this excellently, wouldn't you agree?
5) More use of tabs. Tabs are a surprisingly easy mechanism for users to pick up. Note that all the navigation menus on the web are a version of the essential "tab view" concept. I fail to see what tabs accomplish that the Windows task bar or OS X dock doesn't. Tabs are used for switching between windows of a specific application, nothing more, nothing less. In fact, since tabs are an alternative way of switching between windows, the combination of the two (tabs and taskbar/dock) complicates matters even more.
6) Larger UI elements. Since the UI would only show the elements absolutely necessary at the moment, UI elements could be large, which greatly speeds up pattern recognition in the human brain.
Showing and hiding UI elements does not speed up pattern recognition, but slows it down, since the pattern keeps changing all the time.
8) More use of text. The human brain is a language processing machine
Bzzz... wrong. The brain is an image processing machine. Language gliphs happen to be images as well, but require more processing than clear, carefully selected icons.
Coding alone has never resulted in anything worthwhile. Actually thinking about the code you're about to write and writingaspecificationhas.
Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited
on
Behind Deep Blue
·
· Score: 1
...but will it have a soul?
Oh please. As long as we cannot clearly define what the human soul is, we cannot possibly recreate one in a computer. And since each definition of soul is bound to encourage (part-time) philosophers to say that a soul is something immaterial, and cannot be defined, we're stuck with soulless AIs.
Not that that is a big problem though. Humans should stick with things they do best (emotions and various other soul-based-activities), and computers should stick to their core business: calculations.
There are a couple of books concerning software development which might help you make a point to your manager. For instance:
Extreme Programming explained page 60:...no one can put in 60 hours a week for many weeks and still be fresh and creative and careful and confident. Don't do that. and on the same page: Overtime is a symptom of a serious problem on the project. The XP [ = Extreme Programming ] rule is simple - you can't work a second week of overtime. The XP philosophy works on the basis that software development is a creative process, and therefore needs a clear mind.
Rapid Development pages 599-608: Don't require [developers to put in] overtime; it will produce less total output. In this chapter, McConnell states that voluntary overtime is a good thing, but that requiring overtime all the time is bad.
I recommend these books wholeheartedly; they are both worth their weight in Gold Pressed Latinum[1]!
Good Luck,
Arjen
[1] - The XP Book is quite thin and therefore light. It is actually worth ten times its weight in Latinum.
Joel (of Joel on Software fame) has an interesting article about interviewing, entitled The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing. The name is self-explanatory, I guess.
I wonder if this programming contest can be considered a Turing Test, which began as Turing's "imitation game":
The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the "imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B.
The Turing Test is a slight adaptation of this imitation game. There are three players: an interrogator, a human being and a computer. The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal, therefore can't see them. The interrogator's task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human, only by asking them questions. If the machine can "fool" the interrogator, it is intelligent.
FYI, there is also another competition called the Loebner Contest, where a $100,000 prize is offered to the author of the first program to pass this Turing test. Bots have entered this competition often, with varied degrees of results.
I was surprised to find that Altavista's Babelfish utility has very poor analysis of context (possibly none at all).
While contextual knowledge can increase the qualitiy of a translation; the amount of world knowledge necessary to translate a typical web page is simply astounding. Most users of a translation system simply do not want to wait for hours to translate a simple sentence.
And, there is the problem of linguistic knowledge. Most web pages are not written in "proper" English, but in some Web-speak-lingo. This requires the system to be very robust.
The most successful use of MT in corporations today are situations where a very simple grammar and lexicon is used, and very little world knowledge ois required. For instance, the Xerox corporation has its own translation system that translates component manuals. The technical writers that write the original version of the manual are required to use very simple English only, without any ambiguities and with very simple constructions.
For translation software that has multiple language targets, i would have expected it to first resolve the meaning of the English sentence into an internal semantic representation before using it to emit Spanish or French.
This "internal semantic representation" is called an Interlingua. It has been used in various MT systems, with varied amounts of succes.
The most important advantage of an Interlingua-based MT system is that is does not require a translation engine for each language pair. For instance, if you create a system for English, French, Dutch and German texts, you only need to create four analysis engines:
English -> interlingua
French -> interlingua
German -> interlingua
Dutch -> interlingua
And four generation engines:
interlingua -> English
interlingua -> French
interlingua -> German
interlingua -> Dutch
With a non-interlingua system (which is called a Transfer system), you'd have to create 3^2=9 engines:
English -> French
English -> German
English -> Dutch
French -> English
French -> German
French -> Dutch
etc..
Clearly, it is easier to integrate new languages into a interlingua system than into a transfer system.
The `spirit is willing' story is amusing, and it really is a pity that it is not true. However, like most MT `howlers' it is a fabrication. In fact, for the most part, they were in circulation long before any MT system could have produced them (variants of the `spirit is willing' example can be found in the American press as early as 1956, but sadly, there does not seem to have been an MT system in America which could translate from English into Russian until much more recently --- for sound strategic reasons, work in the USA had concentrated on the translation of Russian into English, not the other way round). Of course, there are real MT howlers. Two of the nicest are the translation of French avocat (`advocate', `lawyer' or `barrister') as avocado, and the translation of Les soldats sont dans le café as The soldiers are in the coffee. However, they are not as easy to find as the reader might think, and they certainly do not show that MT is useless.
BTW, since this book is no longer available in the stores, the whole contents is placed online. I recommend reading this book to anyone who is interested into the subject of MT. It really is a nice introduction into the subject.
As I'm writing my Master's thesis on Machine Translation (MT), I found out that idioms are pretty easy to translate. In most MT-systems developed today, idioms are just exceptions to the rule which make up such systems. Simply put:
if (strcmp("John kicked the bucket", str)==0) printf("Jan ging de pijp uit\n"); else . . .
Other difficulties, which can be much harder than idioms, are the following:
Word order problems, as in "John likes Mary" - "Marie plait a Jean" (lit: Mary pleases John)
Headswitching cases, such as "John likes to swim" - "Jan schwimmt gerne" (lit. John swims gladly).
Expressions for which an exact translation simply doesn't exist. For instance, the difference between "John has been living here for five years" and "John has lived here for five years" cannot be expressed in some languages.
Translation irregularies, for instance the German "Schimmel" translates into the English "white horse", but "white horse" doesn't necessarily translate back into "Schimmel", since the literal "weisses Pferd" is also correct.
etc.
etc.
And there are the problems which occur in any Natural language program, resolving ambiguities and context being the main one.
In my experience, it isn't hard to create an MT-system that solves one of these problems. It's putting them together and still have a relatively good system that's the tough part.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like I have to repeat myself over and over again, since this is an urban legend. According to MACHINE TRANSLATION: An Introductory Guide:
BTW, since this book is no longer available in the stores, the whole contents is placed online. I recommend reading this book to anyone who is interested into the subject of MT. It really is a nice introduction into the subject.
Because, when Microsoft break apps with a new release (be it a service pack, or new version), who do you think is going to be blamed for that by the consumers?
Let's say that Bob uses Stamp Collector Deluxe on his Windows 98 box. Bob decides to upgrade to XP, but unknown to him, Stamp Collector Deluxe relies on some undocumented feature of Windows 98, which does not work on XP. The result: Stamp Collector Deluxe does not work anymore, and Bob blames Microsoft, because it used to run fine on 98.
When you decide on being the most popular OS in the world, compatibility is everything, and Raymond Chen, the person the grandparent poster was referring to knows this better that most of us combined.
Actually, Lost Boys Games used to be part of the Lost Boys family, but I think they parted ways some time ago.
The `spirit is willing' story is amusing, and it really is a pity that it is not true. However, like most MT `howlers' it is a fabrication. In fact, for the most part, they were in circulation long before any MT system could have produced them (variants of the `spirit is willing' example can be found in the American press as early as 1956, but sadly, there does not seem to have been an MT system in America which could translate from English into Russian until much more recently --- for sound strategic reasons, work in the USA had concentrated on the translation of Russian into English, not the other way round). Of course, there are real MT howlers. Two of the nicest are the translation of French avocat (`advocate', `lawyer' or `barrister') as avocado, and the translation of Les soldats sont dans le café as The soldiers are in the coffee. However, they are not as easy to find as the reader might think, and they certainly do not show that MT is useless.
BTW, since this book is no longer available in the stores, the whole contents is placed online, though the server appears down right now. I recommend reading this book to anyone who is interested into the subject of MT. It really is a nice introduction into the subject.
3) Succinct context menus. Context menus should have no more than a half a dozen entries, and should only function as shortcuts for functionality accessible from the "common access point."
;).
Though it is not quite the same, this sounds an awfull lot like the menu-hiding 'feature' in MS Office. It's one of the first things I always turn off
In fact, it could be even worse if - depending on the context your're working in - menus randomly appear and disappear. One of the laws in graphical user interfaces is: keep it consistent. Apple does this perfectly: in MacOS the first two menus have always been and shall always be "File" and "Edit". Hiding and showing menu's and other widgets is not very consistent, and distracts the user.
4) No more windows. Overlapping windows are just confusing and require too much user intervention. A next gen GUI should be based on a full-screen application mechanism. For the relatively few times when more than one application needs to be visible at the same time, mechanisms need to be provided to facillitate this. This is an example of optimizing for the common case.
I think the maximize window functionality found in all of todays GUIs does this excellently, wouldn't you agree?
5) More use of tabs. Tabs are a surprisingly easy mechanism for users to pick up. Note that all the navigation menus on the web are a version of the essential "tab view" concept.
I fail to see what tabs accomplish that the Windows task bar or OS X dock doesn't. Tabs are used for switching between windows of a specific application, nothing more, nothing less. In fact, since tabs are an alternative way of switching between windows, the combination of the two (tabs and taskbar/dock) complicates matters even more.
6) Larger UI elements. Since the UI would only show the elements absolutely necessary at the moment, UI elements could be large, which greatly speeds up pattern recognition in the human brain.
Showing and hiding UI elements does not speed up pattern recognition, but slows it down, since the pattern keeps changing all the time.
8) More use of text. The human brain is a language processing machine
Bzzz... wrong. The brain is an image processing machine. Language gliphs happen to be images as well, but require more processing than clear, carefully selected icons.
Coding alone has never resulted in anything worthwhile. Actually thinking about the code you're about to write and writing a specification has.
Oh please. As long as we cannot clearly define what the human soul is, we cannot possibly recreate one in a computer. And since each definition of soul is bound to encourage (part-time) philosophers to say that a soul is something immaterial, and cannot be defined, we're stuck with soulless AIs.
Not that that is a big problem though. Humans should stick with things they do best (emotions and various other soul-based-activities), and computers should stick to their core business: calculations.
If recent means "about a month ago" then you're right.
I think the article you're referring to was in Wired 4.01.
I recommend these books wholeheartedly; they are both worth their weight in Gold Pressed Latinum[1]!
Good Luck,
Arjen
[1] - The XP Book is quite thin and therefore light. It is actually worth ten times its weight in Latinum.
Joel (of Joel on Software fame) has an interesting article about interviewing, entitled The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing. The name is self-explanatory, I guess.
Do you ever see a BSOD on a cashpoint - I haven't?
I have
The title should read O2, as in the letter, not 02.
So even though the text in that nice Flash page may be cool to look at, it is impossible to find it via your favorite search engine.
Linus Thorvalds
The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the "imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B.
The Turing Test is a slight adaptation of this imitation game. There are three players: an interrogator, a human being and a computer. The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal, therefore can't see them. The interrogator's task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human, only by asking them questions. If the machine can "fool" the interrogator, it is intelligent.
FYI, there is also another competition called the Loebner Contest, where a $100,000 prize is offered to the author of the first program to pass this Turing test. Bots have entered this competition often, with varied degrees of results.
While contextual knowledge can increase the qualitiy of a translation; the amount of world knowledge necessary to translate a typical web page is simply astounding. Most users of a translation system simply do not want to wait for hours to translate a simple sentence.
And, there is the problem of linguistic knowledge. Most web pages are not written in "proper" English, but in some Web-speak-lingo. This requires the system to be very robust.
The most successful use of MT in corporations today are situations where a very simple grammar and lexicon is used, and very little world knowledge ois required. For instance, the Xerox corporation has its own translation system that translates component manuals. The technical writers that write the original version of the manual are required to use very simple English only, without any ambiguities and with very simple constructions.
For translation software that has multiple language targets, i would have expected it to first resolve the meaning of the English sentence into an internal semantic representation before using it to emit Spanish or French.
This "internal semantic representation" is called an Interlingua. It has been used in various MT systems, with varied amounts of succes.
The most important advantage of an Interlingua-based MT system is that is does not require a translation engine for each language pair. For instance, if you create a system for English, French, Dutch and German texts, you only need to create four analysis engines:
- English -> interlingua
- French -> interlingua
- German -> interlingua
- Dutch -> interlingua
And four generation engines:- interlingua -> English
- interlingua -> French
- interlingua -> German
- interlingua -> Dutch
With a non-interlingua system (which is called a Transfer system), you'd have to create 3^2=9 engines:- French -> English
- French -> German
- French -> Dutch
etc..Clearly, it is easier to integrate new languages into a interlingua system than into a transfer system.
The `spirit is willing' story is amusing, and it really is a pity that it is not true. However, like most MT `howlers' it is a fabrication. In fact, for the most part, they were in circulation long before any MT system could have produced them (variants of the `spirit is willing' example can be found in the American press as early as 1956, but sadly, there does not seem to have been an MT system in America which could translate from English into Russian until much more recently --- for sound strategic reasons, work in the USA had concentrated on the translation of Russian into English, not the other way round). Of course, there are real MT howlers. Two of the nicest are the translation of French avocat (`advocate', `lawyer' or `barrister') as avocado, and the translation of Les soldats sont dans le café as The soldiers are in the coffee. However, they are not as easy to find as the reader might think, and they certainly do not show that MT is useless.
BTW, since this book is no longer available in the stores, the whole contents is placed online. I recommend reading this book to anyone who is interested into the subject of MT. It really is a nice introduction into the subject.
if (strcmp("John kicked the bucket", str)==0)
.
.
.
printf("Jan ging de pijp uit\n");
else
Other difficulties, which can be much harder than idioms, are the following:
And there are the problems which occur in any Natural language program, resolving ambiguities and context being the main one.
In my experience, it isn't hard to create an MT-system that solves one of these problems. It's putting them together and still have a relatively good system that's the tough part.