Re: Off Topic: NLP, le to'e melbi glico bo bangu

[Christopher Palmer <reid@pconline.com>]

On Fri, 19 Feb 1999, xod wrote:

> If you follow Moore's Law, and count the number of neurons it enables us
> to simulate, you'll see that my prediction, though not certain, is
> respectable.

The problem is not one of hardware inadequacy, which is all Moore's Law
refers to. An 8088 is probably *fast* enough. :P The problem is that we
don't understand the problem (human language).

> Extend us off silicon into optical/protein/full nanotech computers, and
> you'll agree that real-time better-than-human language translation of bad
> handwriting and drunken accented speech is inevitable.

? I can do that already without biomechanical augmentation. :^) Adding
human brains to hardware is not solving the problem, and would probably
kill the human anyway. :^)

Basically, *Wired* is full of science fiction and bad philosophy.

> "English is hard" is meaningless, but "English is harder than Spanish"
> is both meaningful and measurable. 

What, exactly, does it mean? And how are you measuring 'meaning' and
'difficulty' and 'Spanish' and 'English'?



---------(( Christopher Reid Palmer : www.pconline.com/~reid/ ))---------

              the characters i am, made into a word complete
                              -- Meshuggah