[ExI] Google’s AI Can Now Translate Between Languages It Wasn’t Taught

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK
Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2016 1:12 PM
To: Extropy Chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: [ExI] Google’s AI Can Now Translate Between Languages It Wasn’t Taught

The AI can translate a language pair with a reasonable amount of accuracy if it has translated both of them into another common language.
This removes a significant amount of human input, and it opens the door to AI that learn and problem solve better than ever.

<https://futurism.com/googles-ai-can-now-translate-between-languages-it-wasnt-taught/>

Quote:
Neural networks are machines and algorithms developed to behave like the  human brain—but a development from Google Translate shows that (once again) AI can outperform humans in a big way. Google’s AI can now translate language pairs it has not been trained for. To be clear, this means that it can translate between languages that it wasn’t taught to translate. This works if the AI first translates both of the languages into a common language that it knows.
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More detail here:
<https://research.googleblog.com/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-with-googles.html>


BillK

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WOWsers BillK, this is cool. 

I have been thinking about this problem for a long time, since I was in college and was introduced to the concept of a lookup table, which could be made huge, even in those benighted times.  I have since concluded that universal translation would need to go thru some universal central language with a universal central structure.  The outcome might be awkward, but I think it would work.  

In 1980, I did an experiment where I wanted to take an English phrase, translate it to Spanish, give it to someone else to translate from Spanish to German, someone else translates from German to French, someone else French to English.  We found the translators and arranged to send the messages by email, which was new-ish in those days.  We wanted no other communication between the translators.

That day I was playing a game of chess against an opponent I always beat, but that day he was really playing.  We got into a situation where the queens were facing each other with no covering pieces on them.  If he took my queen, I could force mate with the remaining pieces.  If I took his queen he could force a draw by repetition.  I worked and worked, never did find the win.  So he got his one and only draw against me.

Inspired by that event, I emailed the phrase "Two bare queens struggle to a draw over the board in Haffner House.

It did the loop and came back "Two naked ladies fight on the wooden floor in Haffner House but both lose."

Pretty soon students began wandering over wanting to see these two naked ladies fighting.

Oy.

spike