Of course you can! If you made it, you can analyze very precisely every single computation down to the bitwise level. You will know exactly why the computer made every action that it did.
Even if you would - and I don't think you would, because I feel that there is supposed to be a certain level of randomness in the algorithm - it wouldn't do you any good.
All linguists from Chomsky onward recognize language as being a computational system. Just read Chomsky's first book publication, Syntactic Structures.
First, I'd take exception to "all linguists". Even though Chomsky's ideas have been dominant in the last decades, most have been proven to be plain wrong.
Some are good enough for computational linguistic - Chomsky is a mathematician, after all - but cognitively, he's simply wrong.
Besides, his theories only work for English-like languages.
I'm anti-Chomskian myself, and consider Chomsky's beloved syntax nothing but a device for narrowing down semantics.
Humans are not predestined to learn language. If someone is not exposed to language, they do not learn it, and will never, after a certain age.
You don't really contradict me...
As I said, human children have certain cognitive mechanisms that allow them to learn a language at a certain age. Of course, if they are not exposed to language, they cannot learn it: I never said anything about inventing a language.
If you have no-one to communicate with, how will you learn to communicate?
Anyway, humans are predestined to leatn languages; that's what all the cognitive mechanisms are for.
Claiming that it's not so because if you remove a child at that age from all possibilities and situations of linguistic communication is kind of like not allowing a child to move at all, and then wondering why its legs have atrophied.
Legs are meant for walking, I gather?
It actually takes human children a very short time to learn grammar as far as these robots have learned. If we could eventually code a system in which robots learned language exactly as children do, it would take a few years for them to learn as well, methinks.
If somehow that isn't what I also said, it's what I meant.
And ID does not depend on a perfect design, just an intelligent one.
You obviously didn't talk to the same ID proponents as I did. If something isn't better, then it is because it cannot possibly be any better.
If one can reliably and (even better) minimally mimick any computational system, or any part of a computational system, whether it be human language or the movement of celestial bodies, you have learned something very significant about that system. It means that you know the computational complexity of the system, and you know one possible way to implement it. It doesn't mean you know the particular implementation in the natural world, but you know that your implementation is probably procedurally translatable, so it makes the task of finding the actual natural implementation MUCH easier. You've reduced your algorithm search space by an incredible amount.
Now, now...
First of all, I would be very careful in proclaiming language a computational system.
It is true that some things in language can be computed.
It is true that you can generate valid sentences using finite state automata. At least in languages similar to English.
It is true that numerous programs attempting to learn human language via syntactic analysis exist.
However, this is completely unlike that.
This does not mimick any known language; instead it mimicks the cognitive processes already known to contribute to language acquisition.
If this is really a breakthrough, if it really mimicks language acquisition and development, we can only get an experimental confirmation of certain theories of language origin. And I would doubt that as well, since human brain and silicon chips have different wiring and different memory patterns.
You cannot implement a language. What you can do, however, is implement principles of language acquisition and then let the algoithm run in the wild and see what happens.
Kind of like solving all the possible chess games - IIRC, there are not enough atoms in this universe to store the information about all possible games. However, you can implement a rather simple algorithm which will obey the rules and play the game.
(Damn... ever since de Saussure's time, you can't explain anything in linguistics without a chess analogy.)
Let me put it this way: it takes human children a few years to fully adopt a language (barring vocabulary; that takes you a lifetime.
And humans have evolved language. They are predestined to adopt a language at a certain age. They (I should be saying 'we' here, shouldn't I?) have certain highly optimized cognitive processes which enable language acquisition.
All that, developed through thousands of years, and still children need a few years to adopt a language.
Alternatively, if we were intelligently designed (bear with me for a moment), what does all that say about the perfect design? How complex is language if something designed by a supreme being needs years to learn it?
Frankly, if ever we produce something that will be able to learn a language in a shorter while, I'll take that as a final nail in ID's coffin.
However you put it, you're nowhere closer to grasping the complexities of language just because you implemented language acquisition processes. You still won't know exactly what the machine did how and why. You'll just know that the process works.
I live in Croatia - a country where T-Com is one of the most irritating monopolies.
The behaviour you describe is, I'm afraid, nothing unusual for them.
I moved away from their DSL service after I supposedly downloaded some 4 GB of data in one day, which was a bit more than double the free space on my hard drive at the time. Never even touched their mobile service.
"This is not only important from a robotics and AI perspective, it could also help us understand how language systems arise in humans and animals," Nolfi said.
This is all very fine and dandy, but I don't believe that mimicking what is presently known about human language capabilities will help us understand it better.
The technology was, if I understood the article correctly, built on the foundation laid by cognitive science. It mimics chldren's curiosity, it begins from the general semantics (i.e. selecting an entity), goes on to phonology (i.e. the shape of the symbol for the entity), and deals with finer points (morphology, syntax) in the end...
I'd be very interested to see how it goes on, but I really don't think we'll be seeing a huge breakthrough in cognitive science.
NLP, maybe... almost definitely, if we can get machines to learn human languages.
But I really doubt the humans and animals part.
The problem is, I'm aware of the techniques.
When I see a commercial, I analyse it. I consciously create an opinion. I ask myself do I need it, do I want it and why.
I ask myself what could the commercial be doing to my mind and how.
I'm being bombarded with commercials for chewing gum, but I never buy it.
Then with commercials for fizzy drinks - but I hardly ever drink them - and when I do, I just buy whichever's available.
Hell, whatever it is that's advertised, the best a commercial can do with me is make me investigate the product a bit more.
I may even like a commercial and still refuse to even consider a product just because I don't want to give money to certain companies (the local monopolistic telco comes to mind).
I am more than aware that marketing is just a bunch of lies - that's why I don't believe any of it.
BTW the Mere Exposure Effect is probably the strongest one in marketing - I've heard opinions that it's the only reason there is a marketing industry.
It doesn't matter what your commercial's like; the only thing that matters is that the air time is yours, and not someone else's.
Check politics, the other great industry of lies. It's the same thing.
And to get back to the start... do you think I'd be more inclined to buy the product I mentioned just because of the commercial I saw? Although I don't normally ever ingest anything like it?
There used to be shows like Carrot's Commercial Breakdown...
I actually wouldn't mind shows which only showed commercials.
Hey, what the hell, put in an SMS-based rating system; I'll bet sheeple'll vote.
Just don't interrupt me when I'm watching something else (although sometimes I do appreciate a commercial break, though I call it a toilet break).
And especially don't interrupt me in the cinema.
The way things are going now, I just build lists of products I'll do my best to avoid buying. Just because the commercials annoyed me.
Just the other day I saw an ad for some coffee-type beverage. If I'm not mistaken, coffe+milk. In a tin can.
Featuring a girl squeezing said tin can between her boobs.
It's a nice poster, but the product is totally uninteresting to me: I drink neither coffee nor milk.
I admit, it's a sight... but to me, it's not advertising: no message is getting through.
I just see the boobs.
This kind of marketing can only get people to see the ad; nothing more.
And seeing it isn't enough: if you want me to buy the product, you'll have to convince me that I want it, that I need it and that what you're offering is better and/or cheaper than the competition.
Hence the success of Home^H^H^H^HCouch Potato Shopping channels.
You're not saying some time in the future I won't be forced to watch commercials because some gizmo or another preventing me from switching channels? I'll watch commercials of my own free will?
I don't believe a change of this magnitude throughout the marketing industry is possible.
It would be nice, though.
However, I fear that if I start watching commercials thinking I like it, I'll have been brainwashed. And they won't have changed.
the cartoon of the scientist at the blackboard with a series of equations on one side and concluding equation on the other with "And then a miracle happens." in between.
Do you have that cartoon?
It would come in very handy next time I have enough free time to go argue with Creation Scientists.
What about the law, you say? The best resistance for people against opposing powers is to not care. They can't be expected to follow laws if they are completely unaware, and laws that the people don't like would become meaningless text. Where would you find the manpower to enforce these laws if no-one cared?
Ignorantia legis neminem excusat, if my Latin serves me.
As long as there is a silent minority which not only cares, but actively passes laws which restrict other people who are, at the time, completely unaware of the fact, there will also be the apparatus which will enforce those laws. Which is what I'm talking about.
It is your right not to care... but when most people do not care, what good is democracy?
... but I read that as "indoctrination to the issue".
But let me ask you just one thing: if people are so disinterested and/or uneducated that the have to be introduced to the rights they are about to lose... how does that portray democracy?
From where I stand, I just see sheeple... all the rest of us only differ in the power we wield or do not wield. But most people, sadly, don't really give a damn.
I do hope EFF will bring more people to their senses... it's just the fact that this is the method needed to do it that peeves me.
You have paid, then, for a certain level of quality, right?
If commercial, proprietary software is so much better, why do people who pay for it still habe to be beta testers?
Don't you find this backwards? You paying them money to be able to beta test their software?
When was the last time you read Tom Sawyer?
By submitting bug reports, you're just paying them to be able to paint their fence for them.
With FOSS, submitting bug reports to developers is the least you can do.
With proprietary software, it's a hidden labour tax.
If users stopped behaving like beta testers, maybe once in a while they'd publish finished software.
I do know it's hard to relate to the concept, nowadays, but try to imagine... or recall...
Slashdot Mirror
Rules of Acquisition say:
34. War is good for business
35. Peace is good for business.
34 comes before 35. All clear?
Even if you would - and I don't think you would, because I feel that there is supposed to be a certain level of randomness in the algorithm - it wouldn't do you any good.
First, I'd take exception to "all linguists". Even though Chomsky's ideas have been dominant in the last decades, most have been proven to be plain wrong.
Some are good enough for computational linguistic - Chomsky is a mathematician, after all - but cognitively, he's simply wrong.
Besides, his theories only work for English-like languages.
I'm anti-Chomskian myself, and consider Chomsky's beloved syntax nothing but a device for narrowing down semantics.
You don't really contradict me...
As I said, human children have certain cognitive mechanisms that allow them to learn a language at a certain age. Of course, if they are not exposed to language, they cannot learn it: I never said anything about inventing a language.
If you have no-one to communicate with, how will you learn to communicate?
Anyway, humans are predestined to leatn languages; that's what all the cognitive mechanisms are for.
Claiming that it's not so because if you remove a child at that age from all possibilities and situations of linguistic communication is kind of like not allowing a child to move at all, and then wondering why its legs have atrophied. Legs are meant for walking, I gather?
If somehow that isn't what I also said, it's what I meant.
You obviously didn't talk to the same ID proponents as I did. If something isn't better, then it is because it cannot possibly be any better.
BTW I liked the webpage. Thanks.
I'm sorry, but you're plainly wrong.
If it sent the e-mail, you'd still have to meet all the appointees. That would only be 20% effective.
However, if it failed to send the e-mail, all your time would be free.
Indeed it is.
Are you sure? (Yes / No / PutYourFootInYourMouth)
Um... no, not really. We're too childish for that.
Besides, I don't think we should all just get along. That doesn't encourage competition.
I'm amazed that I'm the first to say: LOL OMG WTF!
I have no other words which could convey what I think about this.
Now, now...
First of all, I would be very careful in proclaiming language a computational system.
It is true that some things in language can be computed.
It is true that you can generate valid sentences using finite state automata. At least in languages similar to English.
It is true that numerous programs attempting to learn human language via syntactic analysis exist.
However, this is completely unlike that.
This does not mimick any known language; instead it mimicks the cognitive processes already known to contribute to language acquisition.
If this is really a breakthrough, if it really mimicks language acquisition and development, we can only get an experimental confirmation of certain theories of language origin. And I would doubt that as well, since human brain and silicon chips have different wiring and different memory patterns.
You cannot implement a language. What you can do, however, is implement principles of language acquisition and then let the algoithm run in the wild and see what happens.
Kind of like solving all the possible chess games - IIRC, there are not enough atoms in this universe to store the information about all possible games. However, you can implement a rather simple algorithm which will obey the rules and play the game.
(Damn... ever since de Saussure's time, you can't explain anything in linguistics without a chess analogy.)
Let me put it this way: it takes human children a few years to fully adopt a language (barring vocabulary; that takes you a lifetime.
And humans have evolved language. They are predestined to adopt a language at a certain age. They (I should be saying 'we' here, shouldn't I?) have certain highly optimized cognitive processes which enable language acquisition.
All that, developed through thousands of years, and still children need a few years to adopt a language.
Alternatively, if we were intelligently designed (bear with me for a moment), what does all that say about the perfect design? How complex is language if something designed by a supreme being needs years to learn it?
Frankly, if ever we produce something that will be able to learn a language in a shorter while, I'll take that as a final nail in ID's coffin.
However you put it, you're nowhere closer to grasping the complexities of language just because you implemented language acquisition processes. You still won't know exactly what the machine did how and why. You'll just know that the process works.
I live in Croatia - a country where T-Com is one of the most irritating monopolies.
The behaviour you describe is, I'm afraid, nothing unusual for them.
I moved away from their DSL service after I supposedly downloaded some 4 GB of data in one day, which was a bit more than double the free space on my hard drive at the time. Never even touched their mobile service.
Actually, I hate them more then I hate Microsoft.
</rant>
"Play? PLAY!"
This is all very fine and dandy, but I don't believe that mimicking what is presently known about human language capabilities will help us understand it better.
The technology was, if I understood the article correctly, built on the foundation laid by cognitive science. It mimics chldren's curiosity, it begins from the general semantics (i.e. selecting an entity), goes on to phonology (i.e. the shape of the symbol for the entity), and deals with finer points (morphology, syntax) in the end...
I'd be very interested to see how it goes on, but I really don't think we'll be seeing a huge breakthrough in cognitive science.
NLP, maybe... almost definitely, if we can get machines to learn human languages.
But I really doubt the humans and animals part.
Yeah, they can go on looking.
I don't think many Slashdotters live in Croatia.
The problem is, I'm aware of the techniques.
When I see a commercial, I analyse it. I consciously create an opinion. I ask myself do I need it, do I want it and why.
I ask myself what could the commercial be doing to my mind and how.
I'm being bombarded with commercials for chewing gum, but I never buy it.
Then with commercials for fizzy drinks - but I hardly ever drink them - and when I do, I just buy whichever's available.
Hell, whatever it is that's advertised, the best a commercial can do with me is make me investigate the product a bit more.
I may even like a commercial and still refuse to even consider a product just because I don't want to give money to certain companies (the local monopolistic telco comes to mind).
I am more than aware that marketing is just a bunch of lies - that's why I don't believe any of it.
BTW the Mere Exposure Effect is probably the strongest one in marketing - I've heard opinions that it's the only reason there is a marketing industry.
It doesn't matter what your commercial's like; the only thing that matters is that the air time is yours, and not someone else's.
Check politics, the other great industry of lies. It's the same thing.
And to get back to the start... do you think I'd be more inclined to buy the product I mentioned just because of the commercial I saw? Although I don't normally ever ingest anything like it?
Oh, worry not...
Weren't they also claiming they owned (sorry: pwned) 2.7 branch or something like that?
In Croatian, 'stolica' (pronounced something like /stolitzah/) can mean both a chair and feces.
Something like 'stool' in English, if I'm not mistaken.
So you could be right.
There used to be shows like Carrot's Commercial Breakdown...
I actually wouldn't mind shows which only showed commercials.
Hey, what the hell, put in an SMS-based rating system; I'll bet sheeple'll vote.
Just don't interrupt me when I'm watching something else (although sometimes I do appreciate a commercial break, though I call it a toilet break).
And especially don't interrupt me in the cinema.
The way things are going now, I just build lists of products I'll do my best to avoid buying. Just because the commercials annoyed me.
Just the other day I saw an ad for some coffee-type beverage. If I'm not mistaken, coffe+milk. In a tin can.
Featuring a girl squeezing said tin can between her boobs.
It's a nice poster, but the product is totally uninteresting to me: I drink neither coffee nor milk.
I admit, it's a sight... but to me, it's not advertising: no message is getting through.
I just see the boobs.
This kind of marketing can only get people to see the ad; nothing more.
And seeing it isn't enough: if you want me to buy the product, you'll have to convince me that I want it, that I need it and that what you're offering is better and/or cheaper than the competition.
Hence the success of Home^H^H^H^HCouch Potato Shopping channels.
I'm sorry, I must have got something wrong...
You're not saying some time in the future I won't be forced to watch commercials because some gizmo or another preventing me from switching channels? I'll watch commercials of my own free will?
I don't believe a change of this magnitude throughout the marketing industry is possible.
It would be nice, though.
However, I fear that if I start watching commercials thinking I like it, I'll have been brainwashed. And they won't have changed.
That's why I used initial capital letters.
It's just a name. A symbol. A mere designation (disclaimer: average Creation Scientist may not prove to be either so hot or so cool as 7 of 9).
It doesn't really have to mean what it says.
Just check all the United, People's and Democratic Republics of whatever throughout history.
P.S. If you want a laugh, go here. Check the projects. Try the veal. You have been warned.
Much obliged!
Do you have that cartoon?
It would come in very handy next time I have enough free time to go argue with Creation Scientists.
Ignorantia legis neminem excusat, if my Latin serves me.
As long as there is a silent minority which not only cares, but actively passes laws which restrict other people who are, at the time, completely unaware of the fact, there will also be the apparatus which will enforce those laws. Which is what I'm talking about.
It is your right not to care... but when most people do not care, what good is democracy?
... but I read that as "indoctrination to the issue".
But let me ask you just one thing: if people are so disinterested and/or uneducated that the have to be introduced to the rights they are about to lose... how does that portray democracy?
From where I stand, I just see sheeple... all the rest of us only differ in the power we wield or do not wield. But most people, sadly, don't really give a damn.
I do hope EFF will bring more people to their senses... it's just the fact that this is the method needed to do it that peeves me.
I'm just waiting... waiting for a virus, attack or whatever you will which will simply turn all the threes into eights in every .xls file...
Until something like that happens, no-one will bother learning about security... really learning.
You have paid for the software.
You have paid, then, for a certain level of quality, right?
If commercial, proprietary software is so much better, why do people who pay for it still habe to be beta testers?
Don't you find this backwards? You paying them money to be able to beta test their software?
When was the last time you read Tom Sawyer?
By submitting bug reports, you're just paying them to be able to paint their fence for them.
With FOSS, submitting bug reports to developers is the least you can do.
With proprietary software, it's a hidden labour tax.
If users stopped behaving like beta testers, maybe once in a while they'd publish finished software.
I do know it's hard to relate to the concept, nowadays, but try to imagine... or recall...
Is there a difference?
WTF?
Fifteen gigabytes for an OS?
Now just let me tag this article as 'yeahright'
It is only secure because it's not going anywhere near my computer.