[agi] Language and AGI (was Re: Early Apps)
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 --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Language and AGI (was Re: Early Apps)
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. In case my position isn't clear, I think that any language will be too difficult to start with and development should be focused on playing a wide range of simple games instead. However I have been really struck by the fact that Esperanto (and no doubt many other artificial languages) can be equal to a natural language in terms of the role they play and yet are something like ten times less complex than a real natural language in terms of language structure. I'm sure a reasonably powerful AGI would be able to infer the Esperanto rule for forming the plural of a noun (you add j to the end of the word) but I think it would struggle to work out how to do it in Italian (it's about six pages of rules in my Italian grammar book and than doesn't cover all the weird cases like when a word changes gender conditionally when forming a plural depending on the context). Sure, getting a computer to speak Esperanto would still be *really* hard, but having hundreds of pages of grammar rules that serve no real purpose other than to add a truck load of complexity to an already difficult problem just seems absurd. I guess people continue to do AI with languages like English because that is what is of practical use and where more money is likely to be. Shane --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [agi] Language and AGI (was Re: Early Apps)
Shane, I agreed with the wording in your earlier post more ;) It is true that learning Esperanto would be easier for an AI than learning English or Italian. However, I think that if you had an AI capable of mastering the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface [the really hard part of language, as you point out], then learning the syntactic rules of any language would probably be a piece of cake for the AI... Once an AI understands the world and can communicate in rudimentary incorrect language, you can teach it correct grammar, and it will probably learn the rules faster than most humans... -- Ben -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Shane Legg Sent: Friday, December 27, 2002 7:48 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [agi] Language and AGI (was Re: Early Apps) 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. In case my position isn't clear, I think that any language will be too difficult to start with and development should be focused on playing a wide range of simple games instead. However I have been really struck by the fact that Esperanto (and no doubt many other artificial languages) can be equal to a natural language in terms of the role they play and yet are something like ten times less complex than a real natural language in terms of language structure. I'm sure a reasonably powerful AGI would be able to infer the Esperanto rule for forming the plural of a noun (you add j to the end of the word) but I think it would struggle to work out how to do it in Italian (it's about six pages of rules in my Italian grammar book and than doesn't cover all the weird cases like when a word changes gender conditionally when forming a plural depending on the context). Sure, getting a computer to speak Esperanto would still be *really* hard, but having hundreds of pages of grammar rules that serve no real purpose other than to add a truck load of complexity to an already difficult problem just seems absurd. I guess people continue to do AI with languages like English because that is what is of practical use and where more money is likely to be. Shane --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [agi] Language and AGI (was Re: Early Apps)
- Original Message - From: Shane Legg [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, December 27, 2002 7:48 PM Subject: Re: [agi] Language and AGI (was Re: Early Apps) I guess people continue to do AI with languages like English because that is what is of practical use and where more money is likely to be. Shane A newspeak style language might be useful for communicating with fairly simple AI's An emerging mind would probably have no more use for 10 synonyms for have than a baby learning to talk does. But natural language may be one of the more 'difficult' approaches to AI. The various experiments that have been conducted in regards to the Sapir-Worf hypothesis lead me to question the notion of language as the root of intelligence. It seems likely to me that a human stores and manipulates primarily conceptual constructions, not linguistic ones. The language one speaks certainly influences thought processes, but few people think in sentences. J Standley --- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
