5 ms·

Alpha: A translation of Genesis 1

133 points by npilk 4y ago

From the post: "This was made with the help of a computer program [word2vec] that tries to express the meaning of any word by an adjective and a noun pair. Phrases like 'abstract astronomy' for 'space' and 'aquatic archipelagos' for 'islands' were generated by the program."

deleted 4y ago
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rgovostes 4y ago
The author, Doug Summers Stay, explained the method to me a few years ago: --- The idea is very simple. You have a target word and a library of possible adjectives and nouns that start with the letter a, for example. You add an extra element to each vector, so they are now 301 dimensional vectors. For adjectives, you set this to 10, for nouns to -10. In the target word, you set this element to zero. (You might have to play with the values 10 and -10 a little: they should be weighted high enough compared to the other elements that getting them right is a necessity rather than just a nice thing to have.) A sparse decomposition function such as LASSO takes in a (1 x 301 target vector) and a library of n possible vectors stacked up as a (n x 301 matrix) and outputs a (n x 1 vector) which shows how each of the n possible vectors in the library should be weighted in a sum. You tune the sparsity parameter so that it is looking for exactly two non-zero weights. So it needs to find two vectors that add up as closely as possible to the target vector, and one of them must be an adjective and one must be a noun to make it work out right. You perform the sparse decomposition and the non-zero weighted elements are the adj. and noun you want. You can run it again with those words removed from the dictionary if you want other choices. This is just something I came up with and tested. It's never been published anywhere that I'm aware of. You can easily imagine variations to find any number of terms with particular properties or relationships to each other.
nathell 4y ago
Reminds me of Stanisław Barańczak’s paraphrase of Hamlet’s soliloquy where every word on the first line starts with A, on the second with B, etc. Unfortunately, I’m afraid you need to understand Polish fluently to appreciate this: https://czytankianki.blogspot.com/2012/05/przekad-alternatywny.html https://czytankianki.blogspot.com/2012/05/przekad-alternatyw...
tgv 4y ago
Nice. I couldn’t find a scientific sounding name for the kind of alliterative writing, but I did find a book written with similar constraints: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_Africa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_Africa
- axlee 4y ago
  This is called a Tautogram. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram
axlee 4y ago
This is called a tautogram. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram
shever73 4y ago
The voice in my head as I read it is Brother Maynard from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Especially the “anchovies and anenomes” bit.
flobosg 4y ago
(2017) If you liked it, check out the work of Christian Bök, in particular “Eunoia”.
npilk 4y ago
And another bit of fun from the comments: "I used the same tech to make rhyming pairs of words that have a particular meaning. Here's a list of some of my favorite results from that program: cowboy: colorado desperado llama: coat goat Star_Wars: groovy movie, halloween onscreen, iconic hypersonic, cute reboot, droid overjoyed, etc... friar: yeast priest, barbarian seminarian spaceship: moon balloon pillow: head bed trampoline: elastic gymnastic"
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  Kind of reminds me of the book Thing Explainer my Randal Monroe where he uses only the 1,000 most common English words. (Of course the drawings do a lot of the heavy lifting as far as explaining).
  - bitwize 4y ago
    "This end should be pointed toward the ground if you want to go to space. If it starts pointing toward space, you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today."
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    and https://simple.wikipedia.org/ https://simple.wikipedia.org/
  - nl 4y ago
    Way back in maybe 2016 or 17 I actually did a program that used that dictionary (from the book) and Word2Vec to "translate". It didn't work great but was pretty funny. I wish I could find the code now
dazzaji 4y ago
I’d love to see this done with the US statutes and regulations.
zuminator 4y ago
From the comments, someone created an "S" version. [0] Also this exercise reminds me of How The World Was Saved (Jak Ocalał Świat)[1][2] [0] http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.html http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.htm... [1] https://english.lem.pl/works/novels/the-cyberiad/146-how-the-world-was-saved https://english.lem.pl/works/novels/the-cyberiad/146-how-the... [2] (first story) http://lib.mlm.ru/pl_stanislaw_lem_cyberiada.htm http://lib.mlm.ru/pl_stanislaw_lem_cyberiada.htm
schoen 4y ago
I was inspired last year to do an equivalent with B: https://godexperiment.org/beginnings-an-alliterative-rewrite-of-genesis-11-23 https://godexperiment.org/beginnings-an-alliterative-rewrite... ("Blessed Being began by building blue bowl, bottom base..."). (That's not my own site where it's posted, it's my friend Jeremiah's site.) I was also inspired by this S version: https://calvinballing.github.io/saga/ https://calvinballing.github.io/saga/ ("So started saga: Supreme sentience shaped skies, secular sphere...").
analognoise 4y ago
"Adam and Ava are awakened, and achieve awareness." I'm going to say this when waking up from now on: "I have achieved awareness."
- layer8 4y ago
  I feel there might be some subtle difference between awareness and awakeness. :)
deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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Smaug123 4y ago
There's a surprising amount of flexibility here for new translations. For example, I prefer "Autochthon" as a translation for "God", rather than "ancient archangels" (although "Almighty" is the perfect word for later on). A while ago I decided I preferred the following as verses 1 and 2: 1. An advent: Autochthon architects Area, above and abase. 2. Actions articles apparatus, all amorphous and absent; And all asleep across aquatic anarchy. And Autochthon advanced across area.
- schoen 4y ago
  > Autochthon architects Area, above and abase. "Abase" makes sense to me by analogy with its cognates "abaixo" and "abajo" in Portuguese and Spanish, or French "à bas", but it's not clear to me that it's ever literally had the meaning of "down(ward)", "below", or "beneath" in English. Maybe "abased", which apparently has such a literal geometric meaning at least in heraldry?
  - Smaug123 4y ago
    Hmm, yes, I think you're right. There's the more prosaic "… above and all around", which gets at something slightly different from "heaven and earth". Douglas Hofstadter was right all along about how hard translation is!
adzm 4y ago
Curious if there is any source code around for these kinds of programs.
fortran77 4y ago
Well, to the people to whom the Hebrew Bible belongs, there's a reason Genesis (Bereshit) starts with the second letter of the aleph-bet ("Bet") and not the first ("Aleph") Explained here: https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma%2C_Bereshit.1.1?lang=he https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma%2C_Bereshit.1.1?lan... And a summary of the explanation here: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/midrash-tanchuma-bereshit-why-it-matters-which-letter-the-torah-starts-with/ https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/midrash-tanchuma-bereshit-wh... Translating into English, it would have been more interesting to do it with "B"
stared 4y ago
Has a vibe of the Stanisław Lem's Trurl's Electronic Bard. See this translation (from Polish to English): http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lem/WonderfulPoems.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lem/WonderfulPoems.html

133 points by npilk 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

rgovostes 4y ago

The author, Doug Summers Stay, explained the method to me a few years ago: --- The idea is very simple. You have a target word and a library of possible adjectives and nouns that start with the letter a, for example. You add an extra element to each vector, so they are now 301 dimensional vectors. For adjectives, you set this to 10, for nouns to -10. In the target word, you set this element to zero. (You might have to play with the values 10 and -10 a little: they should be weighted high enough compared to the other elements that getting them right is a necessity rather than just a nice thing to have.) A sparse decomposition function such as LASSO takes in a (1 x 301 target vector) and a library of n possible vectors stacked up as a (n x 301 matrix) and outputs a (n x 1 vector) which shows how each of the n possible vectors in the library should be weighted in a sum. You tune the sparsity parameter so that it is looking for exactly two non-zero weights. So it needs to find two vectors that add up as closely as possible to the target vector, and one of them must be an adjective and one must be a noun to make it work out right. You perform the sparse decomposition and the non-zero weighted elements are the adj. and noun you want. You can run it again with those words removed from the dictionary if you want other choices. This is just something I came up with and tested. It's never been published anywhere that I'm aware of. You can easily imagine variations to find any number of terms with particular properties or relationships to each other.

nathell 4y ago

Reminds me of Stanisław Barańczak’s paraphrase of Hamlet’s soliloquy where every word on the first line starts with A, on the second with B, etc. Unfortunately, I’m afraid you need to understand Polish fluently to appreciate this: https://czytankianki.blogspot.com/2012/05/przekad-alternatywny.html https://czytankianki.blogspot.com/2012/05/przekad-alternatyw...

tgv 4y ago

Nice. I couldn’t find a scientific sounding name for the kind of alliterative writing, but I did find a book written with similar constraints: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_Africa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_Africa

axlee 4y ago
This is called a Tautogram. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram

axlee 4y ago

This is called a tautogram. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautogram

shever73 4y ago

The voice in my head as I read it is Brother Maynard from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Especially the “anchovies and anenomes” bit.

flobosg 4y ago

(2017) If you liked it, check out the work of Christian Bök, in particular “Eunoia”.

npilk 4y ago

And another bit of fun from the comments: "I used the same tech to make rhyming pairs of words that have a particular meaning. Here's a list of some of my favorite results from that program: cowboy: colorado desperado llama: coat goat Star_Wars: groovy movie, halloween onscreen, iconic hypersonic, cute reboot, droid overjoyed, etc... friar: yeast priest, barbarian seminarian spaceship: moon balloon pillow: head bed trampoline: elastic gymnastic"

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
Kind of reminds me of the book Thing Explainer my Randal Monroe where he uses only the 1,000 most common English words. (Of course the drawings do a lot of the heavy lifting as far as explaining).
- bitwize 4y ago
  "This end should be pointed toward the ground if you want to go to space. If it starts pointing toward space, you are having a bad problem and you will not go to space today."
- guerrilla 4y ago
  and https://simple.wikipedia.org/ https://simple.wikipedia.org/
- nl 4y ago
  Way back in maybe 2016 or 17 I actually did a program that used that dictionary (from the book) and Word2Vec to "translate". It didn't work great but was pretty funny. I wish I could find the code now

dazzaji 4y ago

I’d love to see this done with the US statutes and regulations.

zuminator 4y ago

From the comments, someone created an "S" version. [0] Also this exercise reminds me of How The World Was Saved (Jak Ocalał Świat)[1][2] [0] http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.html http://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.htm... [1] https://english.lem.pl/works/novels/the-cyberiad/146-how-the-world-was-saved https://english.lem.pl/works/novels/the-cyberiad/146-how-the... [2] (first story) http://lib.mlm.ru/pl_stanislaw_lem_cyberiada.htm http://lib.mlm.ru/pl_stanislaw_lem_cyberiada.htm

schoen 4y ago

I was inspired last year to do an equivalent with B: https://godexperiment.org/beginnings-an-alliterative-rewrite-of-genesis-11-23 https://godexperiment.org/beginnings-an-alliterative-rewrite... ("Blessed Being began by building blue bowl, bottom base..."). (That's not my own site where it's posted, it's my friend Jeremiah's site.) I was also inspired by this S version: https://calvinballing.github.io/saga/ https://calvinballing.github.io/saga/ ("So started saga: Supreme sentience shaped skies, secular sphere...").

analognoise 4y ago

"Adam and Ava are awakened, and achieve awareness." I'm going to say this when waking up from now on: "I have achieved awareness."

layer8 4y ago
I feel there might be some subtle difference between awareness and awakeness. :)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Smaug123 4y ago

There's a surprising amount of flexibility here for new translations. For example, I prefer "Autochthon" as a translation for "God", rather than "ancient archangels" (although "Almighty" is the perfect word for later on). A while ago I decided I preferred the following as verses 1 and 2: 1. An advent: Autochthon architects Area, above and abase. 2. Actions articles apparatus, all amorphous and absent; And all asleep across aquatic anarchy. And Autochthon advanced across area.

schoen 4y ago
> Autochthon architects Area, above and abase. "Abase" makes sense to me by analogy with its cognates "abaixo" and "abajo" in Portuguese and Spanish, or French "à bas", but it's not clear to me that it's ever literally had the meaning of "down(ward)", "below", or "beneath" in English. Maybe "abased", which apparently has such a literal geometric meaning at least in heraldry?
- Smaug123 4y ago
  Hmm, yes, I think you're right. There's the more prosaic "… above and all around", which gets at something slightly different from "heaven and earth". Douglas Hofstadter was right all along about how hard translation is!

adzm 4y ago

Curious if there is any source code around for these kinds of programs.

fortran77 4y ago

Well, to the people to whom the Hebrew Bible belongs, there's a reason Genesis (Bereshit) starts with the second letter of the aleph-bet ("Bet") and not the first ("Aleph") Explained here: https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma%2C_Bereshit.1.1?lang=he https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma%2C_Bereshit.1.1?lan... And a summary of the explanation here: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/midrash-tanchuma-bereshit-why-it-matters-which-letter-the-torah-starts-with/ https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/midrash-tanchuma-bereshit-wh... Translating into English, it would have been more interesting to do it with "B"

stared 4y ago

Has a vibe of the Stanisław Lem's Trurl's Electronic Bard. See this translation (from Polish to English): http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lem/WonderfulPoems.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lem/WonderfulPoems.html