-- Matt Mahoney, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--- On Sat, 9/20/08, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >It seems a big stretch to me to call theorem-proving guidance a "language >modeling problem" ... one may be able to make sense of this statement, but >only by treating the concept of language VERY abstractly, differently from the >commonsense use of the word... I mean that for search problems such as theorem proving, solving differential equations, or integration, you look for "similar" problems in the sense of natural language modeling, i.e. related words or similar grammatical structures. We think about symbols in formal languages in fundamentally the same way we think about words and sentences. We learn to associate "x > y" with "y < x" by the same process that we learn to associate "x is over y" with "y is under x". As a formal language, the representation in our brains is inefficient, so we use pencil and paper or computers for anything that requires a long sequence of steps. But it is just what we need for heuristics to guide a theorem prover. To prove a theorem, you study "similar" theorems and try "similar" steps, where "similar" means they share the same or related terms and grammatical structures. Math textbooks contain lots of proofs, not because we wouldn't otherwise believe the theorems, but because they teach us to come up with our own proofs. >But neverthless, I don't think that the current best-of-breed text processing >approaches have much to teach us about AGI. > >To pursue an overused metaphor, to me that's sort of like trying to understand >flight by carefully studying the most effective high-jumpers. OK, you might >learn something, but you're not getting at the crux of the problem... A more appropriate metaphor is that text compression is the altimeter by which we measure progress. ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
