4 ms·

I think it's possible. Human brains are not wired to understand exponential growth. I don't think it will happen within 5 years, but 10 = very possible.

dalke 14y ago
You've just said that human brains "are not wired to understand exponential growth" but then made a prediction based on understanding exponential growth. Plus, you haven't established the doubling factor for the growth - it might be exponential but needing 20 years to get twice as good. "Perfect instant translation" requires full AI. Consider the Borges story "Hombre de la esquina rosada". That translates directly to "The Man of the Pink Corner." But the "corner" here means also the corner store, so it's not just the physical corner but also the "hangout for the low-life of the barrio." (I'm quoting from the translator's notes here.) Moreover, the "pink" refers to the pastel hues popular in earlier decades, so the pink implies an older neighborhood "populated by toughs and knife fighters." If you knew Buenos Aires of 100 years ago then you would infer that directly from the title. But without the context you just know it as "the pink corner." I've thought that "The Hood of the Pink Corner" would be a better translation, given the double or triple meaning of "hood" to mean "hoodlum", "neighborhood", and more specifically "poor neighborhood." It's not as direct, but it might be better. How do you explain those nuances to a computer? Douglas Hofstader gives more examples of the difficulties in natural language to natural language translation. How does one translate a nonsense poem like "Jabberwocky"? One French translation starts "Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux. Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave..." Or, and I quote from his Gödel, Escher, Bach: Take a look at the first sentence of Dostoevsky's novel 'Crime and Punishment' in Russian and then in a few different English translations... The first sentence employs the street name "S. Pereulok" (as transliterated). What is the meaning of this? A careful reader of Dostoevsky's work who knows Leningrad ... can discover by doing some careful checking of the rest of the geography in the book ... that the street must be 'Stoliaryny Peteulok". .. should we keep the initial so as to reproduce the aura of semi-mystery which appears already in this first sentence of the book? We could get to "S. Lane", ("lane" being the standard translation of "pereulok"). None of the translators took this tack. However, one chose to write "S. Place". [The second] gave the translation as "Stoliarny Place". What about number 3? That's the most interesting of all. The translation says "Carpenter's Lane." And why not, indeed? After all, "stoliar" means "carpenter" and "ny" is an adjectival ending. He then goes on to argue that perhaps we should just read Dickens instead, since Dickens is, at some level, a "translation" of the Dosteovsky novel. BTW, Google Translate gives "S. Lane", which none of the three translators used. As that's the obvious and most direct translation, which the humans didn't choose, I assume that we can say it's not the perfect translation. How would an automatic translation system, without AI, look at "С. Переулок", figure out that it's supposed to be "Столярный Переулок", and translate it correctly?
- sixQuarks 14y ago
  Just because human brains are not wired to understand exponential growth doesn't mean you can't understand it. I'm talking about human intuition. I understand the problems inherent in translation. But again, I still feel it's possible to have instant translation within 10 years. The only way to find out is to wait and see. I'll give you a dollar if I'm wrong in 2023.
  - dalke 14y ago
    ha-ha on myself! I read "With DARPA and Google racing to perfect instant translation" as "PERfect" meaning 100% perfect quality, and not "perFECT" as in to smooth out the details. Well, there goes my PERfect understanding skills. That's not a bet I want to take. We have "instant translation" now - I've seen demos. It's just rather crappy. What level do you expect that we'll have in 10 years? My challenge would be to take chapter 12 of Gödel, Escher, Bach and translate it into Swahili then ask the Swahili speaker if it seems stilted or normal. Well, compared to what a human translator would do. Chapter 12 contains a mixture of English, French, German, and transliterated Russian, but is perfectly understandable to someone who doesn't know the non-English language, because the text describes how to understand the missing parts. It also uses "ASU" as an inversion of "USA", where "ASU" is defined in the text as "Alternative Structure of the Union." Will the translation into Swahili handle that in-text complexity?
    - sixQuarks 14y ago
      I don't think 90% of the population can even understand Godel, Escher, Bach, let alone translate it in any meaningful way. You're asking too much from a computer. Perhaps in 30 years that can happen. I think computers will be able to translate very accurately at a middle-school level within 10 years.
      - dalke 14y ago
        This wasn't a hard chapter of GEB. :) Okay, what about Asterix and Obelisk? Still, can you quantify what "very accurately" and "middle-school level" means? Do you think in 10 years that machine translation will be able to translate the following two (independent) paragraphs correctly? Hikaru liked the old English teacher more than the new Scottish one. He still found it hard to understand the replacement's strange dialect as she droned away about the Battle of Agincourt, the Treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle, or how Paris 'deserves a mass', while the boyish Londoner had made far-away European history seem exciting. Hikaru liked the old English teacher most of all. He moved to London only a year ago, and Mrs. Bane had helped him fall in love with the language. Her 40 years of service had not stunted her enthusiasm one bit, as she taught him and her other charges about the subtleties in Shakespeare, the humor in Carroll, and the epic power of Morrison. In the first, "old English teacher" refers to the previous history teacher, who was from London. In the second, it refers to the teacher of English, who is at least 60 years old. In some Germanic languages, the first is written as something akin to "english teacher" and the second "englishteacher." To translate it correctly, the translator has to read ahead to disambiguate the meaning. Which isn't hard, even for middle-school students. But it is hard for computers. In other languages, gender is more important. In the first paragraph, it's very likely that the "old English teacher" is a man, and the new Scottish one is a woman. In the second paragraph, the "old English teacher" is a woman. Is your claim that an automatic translation system will be able to translate these correctly to (say) Swedish or French, within 10 years? I don't see it happening. To do so requires some quite good AI, while much of the progress over the last 10 years has been by rejecting traditional AI and collecting large statistical samples. BTW, the current Swedish translations from Google translate for these are "Hikaru gillade gamla engelsklärare mer än den nya skotska ett." and "Hikaru gillade gamla engelsklärare mest av allt." Both are wrong. The first should be more like "Hikaru gillade den förra engelsk lärare mer än den nya skotska." and the second "Hikaru gillade den gamla engelsklärare mest av allt.

dalke 14y ago

You've just said that human brains "are not wired to understand exponential growth" but then made a prediction based on understanding exponential growth. Plus, you haven't established the doubling factor for the growth - it might be exponential but needing 20 years to get twice as good. "Perfect instant translation" requires full AI. Consider the Borges story "Hombre de la esquina rosada". That translates directly to "The Man of the Pink Corner." But the "corner" here means also the corner store, so it's not just the physical corner but also the "hangout for the low-life of the barrio." (I'm quoting from the translator's notes here.) Moreover, the "pink" refers to the pastel hues popular in earlier decades, so the pink implies an older neighborhood "populated by toughs and knife fighters." If you knew Buenos Aires of 100 years ago then you would infer that directly from the title. But without the context you just know it as "the pink corner." I've thought that "The Hood of the Pink Corner" would be a better translation, given the double or triple meaning of "hood" to mean "hoodlum", "neighborhood", and more specifically "poor neighborhood." It's not as direct, but it might be better. How do you explain those nuances to a computer? Douglas Hofstader gives more examples of the difficulties in natural language to natural language translation. How does one translate a nonsense poem like "Jabberwocky"? One French translation starts "Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux. Se gyrent en vrillant dans le guave..." Or, and I quote from his Gödel, Escher, Bach: Take a look at the first sentence of Dostoevsky's novel 'Crime and Punishment' in Russian and then in a few different English translations... The first sentence employs the street name "S. Pereulok" (as transliterated). What is the meaning of this? A careful reader of Dostoevsky's work who knows Leningrad ... can discover by doing some careful checking of the rest of the geography in the book ... that the street must be 'Stoliaryny Peteulok". .. should we keep the initial so as to reproduce the aura of semi-mystery which appears already in this first sentence of the book? We could get to "S. Lane", ("lane" being the standard translation of "pereulok"). None of the translators took this tack. However, one chose to write "S. Place". [The second] gave the translation as "Stoliarny Place". What about number 3? That's the most interesting of all. The translation says "Carpenter's Lane." And why not, indeed? After all, "stoliar" means "carpenter" and "ny" is an adjectival ending. He then goes on to argue that perhaps we should just read Dickens instead, since Dickens is, at some level, a "translation" of the Dosteovsky novel. BTW, Google Translate gives "S. Lane", which none of the three translators used. As that's the obvious and most direct translation, which the humans didn't choose, I assume that we can say it's not the perfect translation. How would an automatic translation system, without AI, look at "С. Переулок", figure out that it's supposed to be "Столярный Переулок", and translate it correctly?

sixQuarks 14y ago
Just because human brains are not wired to understand exponential growth doesn't mean you can't understand it. I'm talking about human intuition. I understand the problems inherent in translation. But again, I still feel it's possible to have instant translation within 10 years. The only way to find out is to wait and see. I'll give you a dollar if I'm wrong in 2023.
- dalke 14y ago
  ha-ha on myself! I read "With DARPA and Google racing to perfect instant translation" as "PERfect" meaning 100% perfect quality, and not "perFECT" as in to smooth out the details. Well, there goes my PERfect understanding skills. That's not a bet I want to take. We have "instant translation" now - I've seen demos. It's just rather crappy. What level do you expect that we'll have in 10 years? My challenge would be to take chapter 12 of Gödel, Escher, Bach and translate it into Swahili then ask the Swahili speaker if it seems stilted or normal. Well, compared to what a human translator would do. Chapter 12 contains a mixture of English, French, German, and transliterated Russian, but is perfectly understandable to someone who doesn't know the non-English language, because the text describes how to understand the missing parts. It also uses "ASU" as an inversion of "USA", where "ASU" is defined in the text as "Alternative Structure of the Union." Will the translation into Swahili handle that in-text complexity?
  - sixQuarks 14y ago
    I don't think 90% of the population can even understand Godel, Escher, Bach, let alone translate it in any meaningful way. You're asking too much from a computer. Perhaps in 30 years that can happen. I think computers will be able to translate very accurately at a middle-school level within 10 years.
    - dalke 14y ago
      This wasn't a hard chapter of GEB. :) Okay, what about Asterix and Obelisk? Still, can you quantify what "very accurately" and "middle-school level" means? Do you think in 10 years that machine translation will be able to translate the following two (independent) paragraphs correctly? Hikaru liked the old English teacher more than the new Scottish one. He still found it hard to understand the replacement's strange dialect as she droned away about the Battle of Agincourt, the Treaties of Aix-la-Chapelle, or how Paris 'deserves a mass', while the boyish Londoner had made far-away European history seem exciting. Hikaru liked the old English teacher most of all. He moved to London only a year ago, and Mrs. Bane had helped him fall in love with the language. Her 40 years of service had not stunted her enthusiasm one bit, as she taught him and her other charges about the subtleties in Shakespeare, the humor in Carroll, and the epic power of Morrison. In the first, "old English teacher" refers to the previous history teacher, who was from London. In the second, it refers to the teacher of English, who is at least 60 years old. In some Germanic languages, the first is written as something akin to "english teacher" and the second "englishteacher." To translate it correctly, the translator has to read ahead to disambiguate the meaning. Which isn't hard, even for middle-school students. But it is hard for computers. In other languages, gender is more important. In the first paragraph, it's very likely that the "old English teacher" is a man, and the new Scottish one is a woman. In the second paragraph, the "old English teacher" is a woman. Is your claim that an automatic translation system will be able to translate these correctly to (say) Swedish or French, within 10 years? I don't see it happening. To do so requires some quite good AI, while much of the progress over the last 10 years has been by rejecting traditional AI and collecting large statistical samples. BTW, the current Swedish translations from Google translate for these are "Hikaru gillade gamla engelsklärare mer än den nya skotska ett." and "Hikaru gillade gamla engelsklärare mest av allt." Both are wrong. The first should be more like "Hikaru gillade den förra engelsk lärare mer än den nya skotska." and the second "Hikaru gillade den gamla engelsklärare mest av allt.