28 OCT 2024 by ideonexus

 Quantifying Information Content Does Not Bring Meaning Fr...

It is perfectly true that redundancy aids recognition of a signal as a language or a code, and this recognition is crucial to SETI. However, Shannon’s method provides only a quantitative measure of the complexity of a language or signaling system—not a translation. And while it is axiomatic in cryptology that redundancy helps in deciphering a text, the task of decipherment/cryptanalysis is to move from an encoded text to the original text—not from text to meaning. To get from text to me...
  1  notes

We may be able to quantify the information content of an alien signal, but that is very different from deriving the meaning from the signal.

13 DEC 2017 by ideonexus

 Why We Can't Have "Intuitive" Programming Languages

If a procedure named INSIGHT has been defined and then called seventeen times in the program, and the eighteenth time it is misspelled as INSIHGT, woe to the programmer. The compiler will balk and print a rigidly unsympathetic error message, saying that it has never heard of INSIHGT. Often, when such an error is detected by a compiler, the compiler tries to continue, but because of its lack of insihgt, it has not understood what the programmer meant. In fact, it may very well suppose that som...
Folksonomies: programming intuition
Folksonomies: programming intuition
  1  notes
 
19 MAR 2015 by ideonexus

 Filters on Text and Perception

Many of us are used to having incoming email filtered, decrypted, formatted, and shown in our favorite colors and fonts. These techniques can be taken further. Customization of spelling (e.g., American to British or archaic to modern) would be a straightforward process. Relatively simple conversions could also let you see any text with your favorite date and time formats, use metric or imperial measures, implement obscenity filters, abbreviate or expand acronyms, omit or include technical for...
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From Alexander “Sasha” Chislenko's "Intelligent Information Filters and Enhanced Reality"

24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus

 Google Translate as a Broken Telephone

Another delightful pastime is overtransforming an information artifact through digital algorithms—useful, if used sparingly—until it turns into something quite strange. For instance, you can use one of the online machine-translation services to translate a phrase through a ring of languages back to the original and see what you get. The sentence “The edge of knowledge motivates intriguing online discussions” transforms into “Online discussions in order to stimulate an attractive nat...
  1  notes

Jaron Lanier describes a game you can play with google translate, transforming a sentence through a variety of languages back to its original to see what is produced.

14 OCT 2013 by ideonexus

 Our Algorithms Must Continue Evolving

Actually, if cloud algorithms ever seem to come to rest and need little tending, that should be taken as a danger sign. In that eventuality, stasis would be an indication that people have allowed themselves to be overly defined and guided by old software and have stopped changing, or to put it another way, have stopped living fully. Living languages ought to require continued examples from living people in order for automated translation services to stay up to date. If the cloud has learned a...
Folksonomies: language drift
Folksonomies: language drift
  1  notes

If our translation algorithms become fixed, that means our language has become fixed.