4 ms·
English, an API with over 1.5 billion clients in the wild
by madrox 8y ago
English, an API with over 1.5 billion clients in the wild
- WhiteNoiz3 8y agoIf you think about it, conversation is just a loosely defined API with an extremely high degree of tolerance for poorly formed input.
- jamesmiller5 8y agoI mean we are all just emotional processing silos that trade information and process it right :) ?
- hestefisk 8y agoThat’s a very Wittgensteinian view.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoThis thread now contains a loop. Granted, it's a really long loop, all the way back to 1956, but it's a loop all right: you've essentially summarized the Dartmouth Conference and its assumption "gee, that ought be just a minor research subject - easy, right?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence#Dartmouth_Conference_1956:_the_birth_of_AI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intellig...
- hipjiveguy 8y agoword
- state_less 8y agoTrue, many people know english, but that doesn't mean they know statistics or some other complex domain. "Show me a k-means cluster of this dataset", is likely to be parsed but not understood by many english speakers.
- asfasgasg 8y agoFortunately, Duplex's purpose is booking salon appointments, not to provide a conversation partner about statistical theory.
- state_less 8y agoI was attempting to communicate to the parent and grandparent that transcribing/parsing english and communication are different. We both need to share the model being spoken of to transfer or communicate the knowledge.
- akskos 8y agoyep, english is the protocol (like http) and the domain in question (for example booking an appointment) defines the (very loose) api
- chickenfries 8y agoMy god no one in this thread has a clue about the complexities of natural language. English is not a protocol like HTTP, it's a natural language.
- asfasgasg 8y agoI think you may be confused. I suspect everyone in the thread knows that English is a natural language.
- nyanotech 8y agoOptional functionality :P
- ben_w 8y agoIf it was that straightforward, we’d already have bots that pass the Turing Test. Whatever natural language is, it’s not an API. Might have some overlap, but it’s different.
- uryga 8y agoNobody said it's easy to implement :) I'm curious - what differences do you have in mind?
- danShumway 8y agoAPIs map to a single canonical concept. A "class" in Java actually has a correct definition. There are a nontrivial number of philosophers who believe that this isn't true for language. To simplify that and put it in more technical terms, an API is perscriptive and a language is descriptive. If a bunch of coders decide to start capitalizing "Class" their code won't compile. If enough people start using the word "aint" it becomes a word, regardless of what the dictionary says (see "irregardless"). There is no single authority that can decide what is and isn't a canonical definition. This is why spoken languages evolve so much. Even languages where we've explicitly tried to go the opposite direction (like Esperanto) have evolved into multiple dialects, where subsets of the community simply ignore the standards and still communicate with each other just fine. Note that this is the opposite of what you want with a federated, universal API. The whole point of an API is to standardize between unfamiliar devices. Language is actually pretty bad at standardizing communication between unfamiliar people. Even in the US, different regions and communities use different euphemisms, terms, and definitions.
- ben_w 8y agoJust to add a fun example to demonstrate your point, the original name for Esperanto wasn’t “Esperanto”, it was (translated) “the international language”. It was given the nickname “Esperanto” after the chosen name of the creator, and the word itself it supposed to mean “one who hopes”.
- Piskvorrr 8y ago