Friday, December 27, 2002, 5:15:40 AM, Shane Legg wrote:
SL> One other thing; if one really is focused on "natural language"
SL> learning why not make things a little easier and use an artificial
SL> language like Esperanto? Unlike like highly artificial languages
SL> like logic based or maths based etc. languages, Esperanto is just
SL> like a normal natural language in many ways. You can get novels
SL> written in it, you can speak it, some children have even grown
SL> up speaking it as one of their first languages along side other
SL> natural languages. However the language is extremely regular
SL> compared to a real natural language.
I suspect that Esperanto will not be much more difficult to tackle
than any current existing language, or at best a *tiny* bit easier.
The greatest difficulty of language is not grammar, or spelling,
punctuation, etc. To get an AGI to the point of using _any_ language
"naturally" on the level humans use it is the big challenge. It can
be ancient Greek or Latin with all its declensions and exceptions; the
difficulty lies in the use of language per se.
But this does bring up a related point.
>From a certain perspective, the development of abstraction is part 1)
and developing the ability to _communicate_ abstractions (whether merely
to oneself, as memory, or to others) through the method of language is
part 2) of "the" recipe for the development of "intelligence". 1) and
2) intermingle and / or are different aspects of a single process;
however conceived; there is a discontinuity -- a singularity, if you
will -- that has taken place between general primate thought and human
thought (and that is recapulated in the development from baby thought
to child thought).
The "linguistic step" strikes me as what some have called a quantum
leap -- it is a qualitative jump, a meta jump, rather than an
incremental step, upwards.
Do we expect this quantum leap to arise from "completely naturally"
from an AGI, or do we build our AGIs with something of this nature?
How explicitly do we code for some "ability to abstract"? How closely
does this correlate to the human use of language?
Note, I have no clue how one would go about "building in" such a
capability -- I'm just curious whether it's a too unlikely step to
hope to have occur randomly ("naturally") on a realistic time basis.
--
Cliff
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