[ExI] language

[William Flynn Wallace]

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 1:33 PM, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.pl> wrote:

> On Thu, May 01, 2014 at 01:27:50PM -0500, William Flynn Wallace wrote:
> [...]
> > Do you (plural) think that it will be possible in the not near but not
> far
> > future to say to a computer "I want you to write and execute a program to
> > do xyz." ??  bill w
>
> Depends on perspective. From my point of view it happens
> routinely. All the elements on technical side are already in place,
> affordable voice recognition being the last one to have come. The
> first element, besides working computer, was a programming language -
> in this case, Plankalkul appeared about 70 years ago. People working
> on lambda calculus might have done something in this department even
> earlier, in 1930-ties.
>
> So, today, I fire up Emacs (an editor) and write "xyz" as a note to
> the computer. "xyz" can be up to many kilobytes of text long
> (hundreds, too, but rarely this long as a one long piece). Then I tell
> to the computer: "gcc xyz.c -o xyz" which means "write program xyz
> from description in xyz.c" and if all goes well, I can run it next,
> sometimes it even works. Actually, most of the times I tell to the
> computer "make", and it takes another note in Makefile, which
> describes how to make and what.
>
> There are people who do all of this with Emacs paired with trained
> voice recognition, so here you are. I never so far saw necessity which
> is why I prefer to write notes.
>
> You could now protest that it is not what you meant. But I see no
> problem. I use simplified English, interspersed with algebraic symbols
> and numbers and it is in fact a language in which I talk to the
> computer. How much simplified - depends on actual "dialect". Most
> langs like C rely on about 30-50 words as their core vocabulary. In
> Common Lisp there is almost 1000 words and I still have no idea what
> majority of them mean. Unix-like operating system employs from
> hundreds to thousands of words, each with special options to choose
> and modify exact meaning of many of them. As far as I can tell, it is
> always possible to create new words by defining their meaning with
> words already known (at least in systems with which I am willing to
> spend my time).
>
> So this is how I see it. I guess such views may be grossly unknown
> nowadays in the era of point and click "operating (hehe) systems". The
> "click language" is very poor in meanings and actions. It makes a user
> equal to foreigner who will never learn a language of a country in
> which he is supposed to spend the rest of his life - I believe this is
> only because lack of will, not lack of some brain part (although it is
> very much possible that certain neuronal wiring patterns help a
> lot). But this is not my problem, to be frank.
>
> Now, I realize what you wanted to ask was "when one can talk to the
> computer in a natural language like one would to the waitress or car
> salesman - or one's own personal butler". I hope this will never
> happen. Human language is too ambivalent in many places, often the act
> of communication is designed to hide meaning or to lie about
> it. Besides, it sometimes happens that humans don't know what they
> want and so they cannot tell it properly. The world goes on somehow,
> but I have doubts if this is thanks to our intellectual
> abilities. Pure luck may be better culprit candidate. Likewise, that
> we can somehow transfer meaning from one head to another is probably
> lots of luck and common roots. The more different cultures, the more
> misunderstanding, despite using the same language on the surface. The
> computers either form or will form another such culture, and a very
> different from the human one.
>
> Regards,
> Tomasz Rola
>

​Ambivalency yes, and also ambiguity.  But in my novel the simple language
has no ambiguities ​

​in it.  I think that we will develop a language only for talking to a
computer. This will enormously simplify voice recognition software​.  bill w

>
> --
> ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
> ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
> ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
> **                                                                 **
> ** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **
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