10 ms·

PhD student solves 2,500-year-old Sanskrit problem

133 points by speedbird 4y ago

asaph 4y ago
> Employing this interpretation, he found the Panini's "language machine" produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions. If there are exceptions, I would think the problem isn’t solved. Perhaps the article is being loose with the wording. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
- chmod775 4y ago
  You're speaking a language that has some rules with almost no exceptions. But almost means one can easily list the remaining special cases.
  - asaph 4y ago
    What’s the threshold of special cases allowed where the problem is considered solved?
    - chmod775 4y ago
      The second sentence in the comment you're replying to already answers your question. If that is not good enough, I suspect that no possible answer would prove to be satisfactory.
      - asaph 4y ago
        “Almost” and “easily” are subjective and open to interpretation. My point is, that this is not a rigorous standard.
        chmod775 4y ago
        Languages are generally not very amenable to these things. If you want to construct the entire field of linguistics mathematically that would certainly be interesting to watch. Since a function that is described by a simple equation is mathematically equivalent to a function that is described by a table assigning the appropriate values to each element of the function domain, you could try to come up with a definition for what constitutes the "optimal" way to describe a function. Do the same for any kind of relation. Until you've done so linguists will sadly be stuck applying nothing more than common sense.
    - MockObject 4y ago
      Just a few.
  - bigbillheck 4y ago
    Buddy, I'm speaking English, it's full of exceptions.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  Close also counts in computation, where we routinely handle infinite (or at least combinatorially effectively so) numbers of possible inputs with a few general rules and a finite ("almost no", to use a technical term) number of exceptions.
  - asaph 4y ago
    Perhaps my impression that this grammatical problem should be treated with logical rigor, where even a single counter-example invalidates the solution, isn’t the way this is being treated. The way it was presented in the article was like it was a kind of logic puzzle, for which an elegant solution has finally been found. Sounds like it’s more like a better rule of thumb was discovered that reduced the error rate, not to zero.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- kuroguro 4y ago
  It's also possible some of the writings have grammatical errors.
  - asaph 4y ago
    Well how would you know that if the rules of grammar are not fully resolved?
    - cenazoic 4y ago
      In English, think of all the plurals for which no ‘rule of grammar’ exists; you just have to memorize them. Moose -> moose Goose -> geese House -> houses Mouse -> mice Etc.
      - asaph 4y ago
        In English, the exceptions to the rules are arbitrary and numerous. English is also a moving target. From a logic problem perspective, English grammar is more of a practical brute force endeavor than an interesting one. When I read the article, I was wasn’t comparing the problem to English grammar, but rather comparing it to a logic puzzle that has a perfect solution.
      - somberi 4y ago
        Could not resist Gad Elmaleh's frustrations about learning English (he did very well to do an hour's standup in English): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXR1PRbSfoA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXR1PRbSfoA
bradrn 4y ago
> Sanskrit is only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people out of a population of more than one billion, the university said. This is a somewhat misleading explanation of what Sanskrit is. The Sanskrit language is the ancestor of many northern Indian languages, similarly to how Latin is the ancestor of the Romance languages; Pāṇini wrote his famous grammatical description of Classical Sanskrit around 500 BC, give or take a hundred years or so. Sanskrit is of great significance both historically and religiously, and has been studied continuously since that time. There has also been a recent language revival effort, which is presumably what the reference to ‘25000 speakers’ is talking about.
- alberto_ol 4y ago
  According to wikipedia: There are 2,360,821 total speakers of Sanskrit in India, as of 2011. However, despite attempts at revival there are no first language speakers of Sanskrit in India. In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but the numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_revival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_revival
  - rep_movsd 4y ago
    There are a couple of villages where Sanskrit is taught from birth. Also most schools have Sanskrit as an optional subject (its not very popular in the modern schools, but kids learn at least for 5 years) Its impossible to navigate Indian life without hearing Sanskrit - whether it is in rituals, marriage ceremonies, TV shows, ads and often even school prayers.
- devoutsalsa 4y ago
  A few months ago, I visited a Buddhist university in Bhutan. They were studying religious texts written in Sanskrit. It was quite interesting.
- xony 4y ago
yewenjie 4y ago
> "This discovery will revolutionise the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is on the rise." Why is the interest rising though?
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  The easy answer is an Indian government push to promote the language, but that official push hasn’t really had much of an impact. I suspect the more likely answer is that we are about slightly more than a generation away from India’s fiscal opening in the 1990s which led to a tremendous rise in wealth, and it’s usually children of wealthier people who can afford to pay the opportunity costs of basing a career in the humanities as opposed to STEM or Finance related, so now there are more Indians who would take up the humanities. And if you are taking up the humanities, it makes sense to research highly under-researched and yet extremely old areas of the culture your family is from, since it’s a wide open area with a lot of opportunities that you may have an edge in, having been raised in or adjacent to the culture. In the languages space this would mean more research in Sanskrit and potentially other indigenous languages.
  - svat 4y ago
    > “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” — John Adams, 1780 (https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...) I think your "rise in wealth" answer is correct, but note that it is not just people being able to afford a career in the humanities: it's also people who studied STEM/whatever and now have jobs with a bit of free time to spend on reading, or a bit of wealth to donate to keep their culture alive.
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  maybe correlates with the rise of Indian Nationalism
svat 4y ago
From the title I thought this was about a math problem posed in Sanskrit (of which there's a lot, but no "unsolved" problem AFAIK), but "Sanskrit problem" here is a problem about Sanskrit itself! For more on the domain—the tradition of grammar/vyākaraṇa and the dizzying heights reached by Pāṇini—I recommend this really good essay "Pāṇini: Catching the Ocean in a Cow’s Hoofprint" [1] by the novelist Vikram Chandra (known now as the author of Sacred Games thanks to the Netflix show, but possibly better known among HN readers as the author of Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty). Or if you're looking to get a glimpse by diving into some technical papers (but readable in English), search for "Panini" on Prof. Kiparsky's page: https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/ https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/ Within this still-much-studied tradition—of <4000 terse rules, less than 50 pages when printed, that nail down Sanskrit grammar to a level of detail that has never been matched for any other natural language, and likely will never be—the news here is about a new interpretation of one of the "metarules", which (IIUC) experts used to use contextually, but did not always "work" when blindly applied literally. I imagine that it will take time and discussion by many grammarians before it's clear whether this new interpretation is really a better one. Direct link to the PhD thesis that the article is about: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.80099 https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.80099 [1]: https://blog.granthika.co/panini/ https://blog.granthika.co/panini/ PDF: https://downloads.granthika.co/miscellaneous/Catching+the+Ocean.pdf https://downloads.granthika.co/miscellaneous/Catching+the+Oc...
- fooker 4y ago
  My impression is that the new interpretation reduces false positives but increases false negatives. It remains to be seen if that is desirable. Sanskrit is, after all, a language which has a vast body of literature stretching for ~6000 years. It is tricky to have a perfect set of rules. Historically Sanskrit scholars had found it difficult to accept this idea of diverging usage of the language and labelled a vast majority of contemporary literature as Apabhraṃśa (literally meaning aberration). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apabhra%E1%B9%83%C5%9Ba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apabhra%E1%B9%83%C5%9Ba This weird fixation with rules is what has caused the language to decline over the last several centuries. As you might expect, the famous ancient Sanskrit bodies of work do not really adhere to the strict rules laid out later. That is not surprising, as the rules-people were usually distinct from the poets and story tellers.
pjmorris 4y ago
FTA, problem-solving angle tangential to Sanskrit: > Mr Rajpopat said he had "a eureka moment in Cambridge" after spending nine months "getting nowhere". > "I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer - swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating," he said. > "Then, begrudgingly I went back to work, and, within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns starting emerging, and it all started to make sense." Sometimes the best thing to do after grinding is to just walk away for awhile.
- harrisi 4y ago
  I think about this line of thought a lot in reference to Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?[0] Seems somewhat relevant here. [0]: https://youtu.be/goalPsow7cw https://youtu.be/goalPsow7cw
- jds375 4y ago
  Very true - there’s a famous scene from the movie Pi that talks about exactly this (and puts it very eloquently) https://youtu.be/OGKPmBtBpBo https://youtu.be/OGKPmBtBpBo
  - bibanez 4y ago
    Thank you for reminding me of this film!
- azalemeth 4y ago
  I procrastinate on hard problems for months. It works. Many more mathematical scientists I know do exactly the same thing on occasion Mostly, in order to make progress you need to work at it a lot. Sometimes, however, you need to go away and let it churn away in the back of your mind before trying again and revisiting it with fresh eyes and new knowledge but with your old familiarity. One of the most useful pieces of advice I have ever received was 'try to procrastinate from work with work'. There's something about knowing that the solution to the problem exists (but you don't have it) that really motivates detailed study but will slowly drive you mad if you're not careful.
rg111 4y ago
It's interesting that a Sanskrit breakthrough happens not in India, but in England, a Western nation, by a PhD candidate researching under a European scholar. Can someone explain to me why the breakthrough didn't happen in India? What I think is that as the language is closely related to the religion, Indian people tend to worship it and hence cannot produce critical and innovative research nowadays. Am I right in thinking this? Or am I making an epistemological oversimplification? ___ > Mr Rajpopat said he had "a eureka moment in Cambridge" after spending nine months "getting nowhere". > > "I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer - swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating," he said. > > "Then, begrudgingly I went back to work, and, within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns starting emerging, and it all started to make sense." Diffuse thinking at play. Happened with me many times.
- maphew 4y ago
  There may be dozens of similarly profund discoveries being made in Indian institutions but we wouldn't hear about them simply because they wouldn't be reported in English or talked about in places like HN.
- Someone 4y ago
  > Can someone explain to me why the breakthrough didn't happen in India? Many of the brightest students in India go abroad for their PhD studies. Given that the article says “Indian student Rishi Rajpopat cracked the 2,500-year-old problem” and “I hope this discovery will infuse students in India with confidence, pride and hope that they too can achieve great things," said Mr Rajpopat, from India.” I think this is an example.
  - rg111 4y ago
    My question is, for Physics or CS or Bio, Indians coming to West makes sense to me. But why for Sanskrit, too? India should be the top place to study Sanskrit and do research in it? Why is that not the case?
- thunkshift1 4y ago
  There might be similar or better phd research programs in india as well. However, there is a slim chance they can match the funding that western universities can
bigbillheck 4y ago
There's a lot of weird mysticism floating around about Sanskrit, about how it's the perfect language for AI / computers, how it's really the oldest language, unchanged since the dawn of time, and so on. I don't believe any of it, of course, but I do have to admit it makes the world a little more interesting.
- rep_movsd 4y ago
  It is the only human language with a formal grammar, and was the inspiration for a lot of linguistic science. It has been unchanged for millenia and there is at least some plausible evidence that it existed before 3000 BC You should rework your beliefs based on facts rather than be biased by poorly written articles.
  - bigbillheck 4y ago
    A perfect case in point.
KhoomeiK 4y ago
Shameless plug for my talk on the influence of the classical Indian tradition on Western Linguistics & Natural Language Processing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPl17qiaARM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPl17qiaARM
rohanaed 4y ago
article from Cambridge Uni - https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/solving-grammars-greatest-puzzle https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/solving-grammars-greatest-puzz...
lsrinivas 4y ago
Sanskrit has 1800 odd verbs in its list of verbs which are conjugated in 10 tenses and moods with 3 different persons (1st, 2nd and 3rd persons) and 3 different numbers (singular, dual and plural). There's additionally active voice and middle voice in which some 30% of the verbs can be conjugated. That's a bit like 1800x10x3*3 = 162,000 odd forms. You can add the dual voice forms to these. The heart of Sanskrit grammar (articulated by Panini) provides for rule (i.e., sutra) based generation of these 162,00+ forms. However the grammar only has some 4,000 rules (sutras). So Chomsky and others have called it a generative grammar. In addition, the grammar also covers other things like nouns (whose forms i.e., declensions, can all be derived by applying rules of grammar), nominal compounds and various other grammatical categories. When you derive forms, you have to apply rules. At times, multiple rules are simultaneously applicable. So there's this problem of choice i.e., which is the right rule to choose. Remember the end result is already known from spoken Sanskrit. So the rule that leads you to the right form is the one to be chosen e.g., the plural of 'ox' is 'oxen', not 'oxes'. You are to end up with 'oxen' at the end of the derivational process. So how do you choose the rule - there are various interpretive devices, some are heuristic (like if the penultimate vowel is like this, do this - Latin students must already start to like this, but there is no antepenult of significance in Sanskrit heh heh), some are phonological (if there's a short vowel at the end of a word, drop it), some are morphological (for instance, the rule that applies to the inside of the word has precedence over the one that operates on the word boundary), or that the particular rule supersedes the general rule etc. In all instances when you apply interpretive devices to choose a rule, you think like a judge, not a programmer. This is what is the essential difference between Sanskrit grammar's processes and what you find in a program. That's why 'Sanskrit is a programming language' bozos have not created anything of value up until now. Nor will they, in most Sanskritists' view. Adverting to this thesis and its Eureka moment (I want to kill myself), it takes the view that a central interpretive device in traditional Sanskrit grammar has been wrongly understood and that all the Sanskrit grammarians of some 24 odd centuries were totally out to lunch. Rajpopat has in his thesis a handful of trivially simple examples, mainly nouns, where his 'correct' interpretation works. Nobody has applied his interpretive device to all the nouns. His method will reduce false positives in a small amount of known examples but would generate myriad false negatives everywhere else. As to the verbal system in Sanskrit, it's so complicated that the derivational processes really require a legal mind. Wisely, Rajpopat sticks to mainly nominal forms in his thesis. As a trivial example, his method may generate 'speeched' as the participial form 'speak' rather than 'spoken' or may generate even 'spought', analogous to 'sought' as the participial form of 'seek'. I still feel however that his method, after much refinement, may have some utility for machine generation of certain derivations of verbal and nominal forms because it might have a simpler heuristic for conflict resolution in the event of rule conflict. But remember the traditional grammar does it already and has been doing it since Panini wrote his grammar :) The rest of it is just baseless Cambridge hubris aided by some real high class publicity blitz of the type Cambridge Analytica would have been proud of. Needless to say, Indian media have swallowed it all :) Indians, in general, know no more Sanskrit than a plumber in Chilicothe, OH knows Mycenaean Greek. Just my 2c.

133 points by speedbird 4y ago

> Employing this interpretation, he found the Panini's "language machine" produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions. If there are exceptions, I would think the problem isn’t solved. Perhaps the article is being loose with the wording. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

chmod775 4y ago
You're speaking a language that has some rules with almost no exceptions. But almost means one can easily list the remaining special cases.
- asaph 4y ago
  What’s the threshold of special cases allowed where the problem is considered solved?
  - chmod775 4y ago
    The second sentence in the comment you're replying to already answers your question. If that is not good enough, I suspect that no possible answer would prove to be satisfactory.
    - asaph 4y ago
      “Almost” and “easily” are subjective and open to interpretation. My point is, that this is not a rigorous standard.
      - chmod775 4y ago
        Languages are generally not very amenable to these things. If you want to construct the entire field of linguistics mathematically that would certainly be interesting to watch. Since a function that is described by a simple equation is mathematically equivalent to a function that is described by a table assigning the appropriate values to each element of the function domain, you could try to come up with a definition for what constitutes the "optimal" way to describe a function. Do the same for any kind of relation. Until you've done so linguists will sadly be stuck applying nothing more than common sense.
  - MockObject 4y ago
    Just a few.
- bigbillheck 4y ago
  Buddy, I'm speaking English, it's full of exceptions.
082349872349872 4y ago
Close also counts in computation, where we routinely handle infinite (or at least combinatorially effectively so) numbers of possible inputs with a few general rules and a finite ("almost no", to use a technical term) number of exceptions.
- asaph 4y ago
  Perhaps my impression that this grammatical problem should be treated with logical rigor, where even a single counter-example invalidates the solution, isn’t the way this is being treated. The way it was presented in the article was like it was a kind of logic puzzle, for which an elegant solution has finally been found. Sounds like it’s more like a better rule of thumb was discovered that reduced the error rate, not to zero.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
kuroguro 4y ago
It's also possible some of the writings have grammatical errors.
- asaph 4y ago
  Well how would you know that if the rules of grammar are not fully resolved?
  - cenazoic 4y ago
    In English, think of all the plurals for which no ‘rule of grammar’ exists; you just have to memorize them. Moose -> moose Goose -> geese House -> houses Mouse -> mice Etc.
    - asaph 4y ago
      In English, the exceptions to the rules are arbitrary and numerous. English is also a moving target. From a logic problem perspective, English grammar is more of a practical brute force endeavor than an interesting one. When I read the article, I was wasn’t comparing the problem to English grammar, but rather comparing it to a logic puzzle that has a perfect solution.
    - somberi 4y ago
      Could not resist Gad Elmaleh's frustrations about learning English (he did very well to do an hour's standup in English): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXR1PRbSfoA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXR1PRbSfoA

bradrn 4y ago

> Sanskrit is only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people out of a population of more than one billion, the university said. This is a somewhat misleading explanation of what Sanskrit is. The Sanskrit language is the ancestor of many northern Indian languages, similarly to how Latin is the ancestor of the Romance languages; Pāṇini wrote his famous grammatical description of Classical Sanskrit around 500 BC, give or take a hundred years or so. Sanskrit is of great significance both historically and religiously, and has been studied continuously since that time. There has also been a recent language revival effort, which is presumably what the reference to ‘25000 speakers’ is talking about.

alberto_ol 4y ago
According to wikipedia: There are 2,360,821 total speakers of Sanskrit in India, as of 2011. However, despite attempts at revival there are no first language speakers of Sanskrit in India. In each of India's recent decennial censuses, several thousand citizens have reported Sanskrit to be their mother tongue, but the numbers are thought to signify a wish to be aligned with the prestige of the language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_revival https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_revival
- rep_movsd 4y ago
  There are a couple of villages where Sanskrit is taught from birth. Also most schools have Sanskrit as an optional subject (its not very popular in the modern schools, but kids learn at least for 5 years) Its impossible to navigate Indian life without hearing Sanskrit - whether it is in rituals, marriage ceremonies, TV shows, ads and often even school prayers.
devoutsalsa 4y ago
A few months ago, I visited a Buddhist university in Bhutan. They were studying religious texts written in Sanskrit. It was quite interesting.
xony 4y ago

yewenjie 4y ago

> "This discovery will revolutionise the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is on the rise." Why is the interest rising though?

rhaway84773 4y ago
The easy answer is an Indian government push to promote the language, but that official push hasn’t really had much of an impact. I suspect the more likely answer is that we are about slightly more than a generation away from India’s fiscal opening in the 1990s which led to a tremendous rise in wealth, and it’s usually children of wealthier people who can afford to pay the opportunity costs of basing a career in the humanities as opposed to STEM or Finance related, so now there are more Indians who would take up the humanities. And if you are taking up the humanities, it makes sense to research highly under-researched and yet extremely old areas of the culture your family is from, since it’s a wide open area with a lot of opportunities that you may have an edge in, having been raised in or adjacent to the culture. In the languages space this would mean more research in Sanskrit and potentially other indigenous languages.
- svat 4y ago
  > “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” — John Adams, 1780 (https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17800512jasecond https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L178005...) I think your "rise in wealth" answer is correct, but note that it is not just people being able to afford a career in the humanities: it's also people who studied STEM/whatever and now have jobs with a bit of free time to spend on reading, or a bit of wealth to donate to keep their culture alive.
strikelaserclaw 4y ago
maybe correlates with the rise of Indian Nationalism

svat 4y ago

From the title I thought this was about a math problem posed in Sanskrit (of which there's a lot, but no "unsolved" problem AFAIK), but "Sanskrit problem" here is a problem about Sanskrit itself! For more on the domain—the tradition of grammar/vyākaraṇa and the dizzying heights reached by Pāṇini—I recommend this really good essay "Pāṇini: Catching the Ocean in a Cow’s Hoofprint" [1] by the novelist Vikram Chandra (known now as the author of Sacred Games thanks to the Netflix show, but possibly better known among HN readers as the author of Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty). Or if you're looking to get a glimpse by diving into some technical papers (but readable in English), search for "Panini" on Prof. Kiparsky's page: https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/ https://web.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/ Within this still-much-studied tradition—of <4000 terse rules, less than 50 pages when printed, that nail down Sanskrit grammar to a level of detail that has never been matched for any other natural language, and likely will never be—the news here is about a new interpretation of one of the "metarules", which (IIUC) experts used to use contextually, but did not always "work" when blindly applied literally. I imagine that it will take time and discussion by many grammarians before it's clear whether this new interpretation is really a better one. Direct link to the PhD thesis that the article is about: https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.80099 https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.80099 [1]: https://blog.granthika.co/panini/ https://blog.granthika.co/panini/ PDF: https://downloads.granthika.co/miscellaneous/Catching+the+Ocean.pdf https://downloads.granthika.co/miscellaneous/Catching+the+Oc...

fooker 4y ago
My impression is that the new interpretation reduces false positives but increases false negatives. It remains to be seen if that is desirable. Sanskrit is, after all, a language which has a vast body of literature stretching for ~6000 years. It is tricky to have a perfect set of rules. Historically Sanskrit scholars had found it difficult to accept this idea of diverging usage of the language and labelled a vast majority of contemporary literature as Apabhraṃśa (literally meaning aberration). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apabhra%E1%B9%83%C5%9Ba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apabhra%E1%B9%83%C5%9Ba This weird fixation with rules is what has caused the language to decline over the last several centuries. As you might expect, the famous ancient Sanskrit bodies of work do not really adhere to the strict rules laid out later. That is not surprising, as the rules-people were usually distinct from the poets and story tellers.

pjmorris 4y ago

FTA, problem-solving angle tangential to Sanskrit: > Mr Rajpopat said he had "a eureka moment in Cambridge" after spending nine months "getting nowhere". > "I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer - swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating," he said. > "Then, begrudgingly I went back to work, and, within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns starting emerging, and it all started to make sense." Sometimes the best thing to do after grinding is to just walk away for awhile.

harrisi 4y ago
I think about this line of thought a lot in reference to Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?[0] Seems somewhat relevant here. [0]: https://youtu.be/goalPsow7cw https://youtu.be/goalPsow7cw
jds375 4y ago
Very true - there’s a famous scene from the movie Pi that talks about exactly this (and puts it very eloquently) https://youtu.be/OGKPmBtBpBo https://youtu.be/OGKPmBtBpBo
- bibanez 4y ago
  Thank you for reminding me of this film!
azalemeth 4y ago
I procrastinate on hard problems for months. It works. Many more mathematical scientists I know do exactly the same thing on occasion Mostly, in order to make progress you need to work at it a lot. Sometimes, however, you need to go away and let it churn away in the back of your mind before trying again and revisiting it with fresh eyes and new knowledge but with your old familiarity. One of the most useful pieces of advice I have ever received was 'try to procrastinate from work with work'. There's something about knowing that the solution to the problem exists (but you don't have it) that really motivates detailed study but will slowly drive you mad if you're not careful.

rg111 4y ago

It's interesting that a Sanskrit breakthrough happens not in India, but in England, a Western nation, by a PhD candidate researching under a European scholar. Can someone explain to me why the breakthrough didn't happen in India? What I think is that as the language is closely related to the religion, Indian people tend to worship it and hence cannot produce critical and innovative research nowadays. Am I right in thinking this? Or am I making an epistemological oversimplification? ___ > Mr Rajpopat said he had "a eureka moment in Cambridge" after spending nine months "getting nowhere". > > "I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer - swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating," he said. > > "Then, begrudgingly I went back to work, and, within minutes, as I turned the pages, these patterns starting emerging, and it all started to make sense." Diffuse thinking at play. Happened with me many times.

maphew 4y ago
There may be dozens of similarly profund discoveries being made in Indian institutions but we wouldn't hear about them simply because they wouldn't be reported in English or talked about in places like HN.
Someone 4y ago
> Can someone explain to me why the breakthrough didn't happen in India? Many of the brightest students in India go abroad for their PhD studies. Given that the article says “Indian student Rishi Rajpopat cracked the 2,500-year-old problem” and “I hope this discovery will infuse students in India with confidence, pride and hope that they too can achieve great things," said Mr Rajpopat, from India.” I think this is an example.
- rg111 4y ago
  My question is, for Physics or CS or Bio, Indians coming to West makes sense to me. But why for Sanskrit, too? India should be the top place to study Sanskrit and do research in it? Why is that not the case?
thunkshift1 4y ago
There might be similar or better phd research programs in india as well. However, there is a slim chance they can match the funding that western universities can

bigbillheck 4y ago

There's a lot of weird mysticism floating around about Sanskrit, about how it's the perfect language for AI / computers, how it's really the oldest language, unchanged since the dawn of time, and so on. I don't believe any of it, of course, but I do have to admit it makes the world a little more interesting.

rep_movsd 4y ago
It is the only human language with a formal grammar, and was the inspiration for a lot of linguistic science. It has been unchanged for millenia and there is at least some plausible evidence that it existed before 3000 BC You should rework your beliefs based on facts rather than be biased by poorly written articles.
- bigbillheck 4y ago
  A perfect case in point.

KhoomeiK 4y ago

Shameless plug for my talk on the influence of the classical Indian tradition on Western Linguistics & Natural Language Processing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPl17qiaARM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPl17qiaARM

rohanaed 4y ago

article from Cambridge Uni - https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/solving-grammars-greatest-puzzle https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/solving-grammars-greatest-puzz...

lsrinivas 4y ago

Sanskrit has 1800 odd verbs in its list of verbs which are conjugated in 10 tenses and moods with 3 different persons (1st, 2nd and 3rd persons) and 3 different numbers (singular, dual and plural). There's additionally active voice and middle voice in which some 30% of the verbs can be conjugated. That's a bit like 1800x10x3*3 = 162,000 odd forms. You can add the dual voice forms to these. The heart of Sanskrit grammar (articulated by Panini) provides for rule (i.e., sutra) based generation of these 162,00+ forms. However the grammar only has some 4,000 rules (sutras). So Chomsky and others have called it a generative grammar. In addition, the grammar also covers other things like nouns (whose forms i.e., declensions, can all be derived by applying rules of grammar), nominal compounds and various other grammatical categories. When you derive forms, you have to apply rules. At times, multiple rules are simultaneously applicable. So there's this problem of choice i.e., which is the right rule to choose. Remember the end result is already known from spoken Sanskrit. So the rule that leads you to the right form is the one to be chosen e.g., the plural of 'ox' is 'oxen', not 'oxes'. You are to end up with 'oxen' at the end of the derivational process. So how do you choose the rule - there are various interpretive devices, some are heuristic (like if the penultimate vowel is like this, do this - Latin students must already start to like this, but there is no antepenult of significance in Sanskrit heh heh), some are phonological (if there's a short vowel at the end of a word, drop it), some are morphological (for instance, the rule that applies to the inside of the word has precedence over the one that operates on the word boundary), or that the particular rule supersedes the general rule etc. In all instances when you apply interpretive devices to choose a rule, you think like a judge, not a programmer. This is what is the essential difference between Sanskrit grammar's processes and what you find in a program. That's why 'Sanskrit is a programming language' bozos have not created anything of value up until now. Nor will they, in most Sanskritists' view. Adverting to this thesis and its Eureka moment (I want to kill myself), it takes the view that a central interpretive device in traditional Sanskrit grammar has been wrongly understood and that all the Sanskrit grammarians of some 24 odd centuries were totally out to lunch. Rajpopat has in his thesis a handful of trivially simple examples, mainly nouns, where his 'correct' interpretation works. Nobody has applied his interpretive device to all the nouns. His method will reduce false positives in a small amount of known examples but would generate myriad false negatives everywhere else. As to the verbal system in Sanskrit, it's so complicated that the derivational processes really require a legal mind. Wisely, Rajpopat sticks to mainly nominal forms in his thesis. As a trivial example, his method may generate 'speeched' as the participial form 'speak' rather than 'spoken' or may generate even 'spought', analogous to 'sought' as the participial form of 'seek'. I still feel however that his method, after much refinement, may have some utility for machine generation of certain derivations of verbal and nominal forms because it might have a simpler heuristic for conflict resolution in the event of rule conflict. But remember the traditional grammar does it already and has been doing it since Panini wrote his grammar :) The rest of it is just baseless Cambridge hubris aided by some real high class publicity blitz of the type Cambridge Analytica would have been proud of. Needless to say, Indian media have swallowed it all :) Indians, in general, know no more Sanskrit than a plumber in Chilicothe, OH knows Mycenaean Greek. Just my 2c.