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Chapter Seventeen: I Envy...
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Taberah asked Aed, "What is your trade?"
Aed recalled a moment in graduate school where one of his colleagues had said, "I envy people in nuclear physics. They can tell other people what they do for a living." He said, "I teach -- do you know logic?"
Taberah said, "Yes."
Aed asked, "Have you done geometry?"
Taberah said, "Yes."
Aed said, "What I do is like geometry and logic; logic and geometry are examples of it."
Taberah said, "Give me an example."
Aed thought of the three rules of a metric space, then thought how little those rules illuminated what he was thinking -- as little as a list of chess rules gave any obvious feel for deep strategy. Aed had learned long ago that it was possible to understand the rules of a game completely without having the foggiest idea what its strategy was like -- human understanding never included instant sight into logical depths, any more than good eyes enabled you to see infinite detail despite distance and twilight! In the classroom at the university, Aed would have to bow to custom and labor over the basic rules, but Taberah was not a student at school, and -- "I am studying collections of objects where you can tell how far apart two objects are."
"Like geometry!" Taberah said."
"Yes, but it includes many things that do not have the structure of a space. Like words. 'Man' is close to 'woman', farther from 'dog', farther from 'tree', and farther still from 'rock', and very far from words like 'move'.
Taberah said, "Yes! That's how to cheat on Turing test!"
Aed winced and said, "Uh, how?"
Taberah paced the room in thought. "Can computers record conversations?"
"There are many, many conversations on record. I can download a collection of them now, if you wish."
"Well, first find out how to measure the distance between two words," Taberah said.
Aed nodded. The artificial intelligence literature had found a way to map the distance between words by measuring frequencies of words occurring before and after them in a histogram.
"Then have something that will look through conversations, matching up by words and grammar, and return the closest match!"
Aed looked at Taberah hard, and then said, "Son, how'd you like to learn how to program?"
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Chapter Seventeen: I Envy...
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