On Sat, Apr 06, 2013 at 09:00:26PM -0700, David Barbour wrote: > On Sat, Apr 6, 2013 at 7:10 PM, Julian Leviston <[1][email protected]> > wrote: > > LISP is "perfectly" precise. It's completely unambiguous. Of course, > this makes it incredibly difficult to use or understand sometimes. > > Ambiguity isn't necessarily a bad thing, mind. One can consider it an > opportunity: For live coding or conversational programming, ambiguity > enables a rich form of iterative refinement and conversational programming > styles, where the compiler/interpreter fills the gaps with something that > seems reasonable then the programmer edits if the results aren't quite > those desired. For mobile code, or portable code, ambiguity can provide > some flexibility for a program to adapt to its environment. One can > consider it a form of contextual abstraction. Ambiguity could even make a > decent target for machine-learning, e.g. to find optimal results or > improve system stability [1]. > [1] [2]http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/stability-without-state/ >
IMO unambiguity is property that looks good only in the paper. When you look to perfect solution you will get perfect solution for wrong problem. A purpose of language is to convey how to solve problems. You need to look for robust solution. You must deal with that real world is inprecise. Just transforming problem to words causes inaccuracy. when you tell something to many parties each of them wants to optimize something different. You again need flexibility. This is problem of logicians that they did not go into this direction but direction that makes their results more and more brittle. Until one can answer questions above along with how to choose between contradictrary data what is more important there is no chance to get decent AI. What is important is cost of knowledge. It has several important properties, for example that in 99% of cases it is negative. You can easily roll dice 50 times and make 50 statements about them that are completely unambiguous and completely useless. _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
