4 ms·

I don't see how anything in the book NKS can be remotely related to robust natural language parsing as is claimed in the article, am I missing something or not?

amichail 17y ago
By raising the level of abstraction sufficiently, you can relate anything with anything.
- gloob 17y ago
  That's great and all, but it's not exactly an answer to his question.
  - apotheon 17y ago
    I think it translates as something like "It doesn't have anything to do with it in the real world, but by syntactic trickery it can be truthfully (if not honestly) claimed."
anigbrowl 17y ago
I don't have the book (although I'm tempted by it) but given that probability theory offers useful tools for NLP and cellular automata are finding some popularity among researchers into probability distribution, I can hazily envision a connection. On the other hand, I can't discern where the improvements are besides speed and load balancing. Referring back to old YC threads seems to give the same quality of response as reported when it first opened for business. Forgot to include the link to their developer page - the API docs have matured somewhat and others s/may/will be able to leverage them better than I: http://www.wolframalpha.com/developers.html http://www.wolframalpha.com/developers.html
mr_luc 17y ago
Let me pull something completely out of my butt: Each word is an element; the transition rules are simple substitution with synonyms; multiway system; at each step, it examines to see if the pattern has resolved into a pattern it knows how to recognize. I know, I know, that's naive and not robust at all. :( I'm just sayin'. I'd have had a hard time seeing how you'd use ca to write cell phone ring tones -- and not just completely random ones, either, but the way wolframtones does it. The dude has a serious affinity for that stuff. It's like he's ONLY able to see the world through CA. (Still, probably a net win for humanity to have one person like that in each field at least).
- gjm11 17y ago
  Let me pull something completely out of my butt Yup, that is most likely exactly how Wolfram claims that "NKS" has anything much to do with anything useful Alpha does.

amichail 17y ago

By raising the level of abstraction sufficiently, you can relate anything with anything.

gloob 17y ago
That's great and all, but it's not exactly an answer to his question.
- apotheon 17y ago
  I think it translates as something like "It doesn't have anything to do with it in the real world, but by syntactic trickery it can be truthfully (if not honestly) claimed."

anigbrowl 17y ago

I don't have the book (although I'm tempted by it) but given that probability theory offers useful tools for NLP and cellular automata are finding some popularity among researchers into probability distribution, I can hazily envision a connection. On the other hand, I can't discern where the improvements are besides speed and load balancing. Referring back to old YC threads seems to give the same quality of response as reported when it first opened for business. Forgot to include the link to their developer page - the API docs have matured somewhat and others s/may/will be able to leverage them better than I: http://www.wolframalpha.com/developers.html http://www.wolframalpha.com/developers.html

mr_luc 17y ago

Let me pull something completely out of my butt: Each word is an element; the transition rules are simple substitution with synonyms; multiway system; at each step, it examines to see if the pattern has resolved into a pattern it knows how to recognize. I know, I know, that's naive and not robust at all. :( I'm just sayin'. I'd have had a hard time seeing how you'd use ca to write cell phone ring tones -- and not just completely random ones, either, but the way wolframtones does it. The dude has a serious affinity for that stuff. It's like he's ONLY able to see the world through CA. (Still, probably a net win for humanity to have one person like that in each field at least).

gjm11 17y ago
Let me pull something completely out of my butt Yup, that is most likely exactly how Wolfram claims that "NKS" has anything much to do with anything useful Alpha does.