On Friday, July 05, 2013 22:34:57 Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 07/05/2013 10:34 PM, Timon Gehr wrote:
> > On 07/05/2013 10:09 PM, Namespace wrote:
> >>> Unary ~ is bitwise not in Java and D, and he is referring to binary usage.
> >>> 
> >>> [...] use ~ for _any_ purpose.
> >> 
> >> I'd expected that *any* really means *any* and do not refer to binary.
> > 
> > Yes. Neither do 'use', 'for' and 'purpose'. Establishing that it is likely that ~ is referring to binary requires some more context (eg. it is likely that the two usages of ~ in his post refer to the same thing), common sense or the assumption that Jonathan probably knows about the unary usage. (Parsing natural language is quite hard though, so I could be wrong.)
> 
> Turns out I was wrong. :o)

Yeah, well. It doesn't hurt my feelings any if you're erring on the side of thinking that I know what I'm talking about. :)

And I'm certain that I've seen the unary usage of ~ before. I just couldn't think of it when I posted today. I really need more sleep...

- Jonathan M Davis

On Friday, 5 July 2013 at 20:34:26 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 07/05/2013 10:09 PM, Namespace wrote:
>>> Unary ~ is bitwise not in Java and D, and he is referring to binary
>>> usage.
>>
>>> [...] use ~ for _any_ purpose.
>> I'd expected that *any* really means *any* and do not refer to binary.
>
> Yes. Neither do 'use', 'for' and 'purpose'. Establishing that it is likely that ~ is referring to binary requires some more context (eg. it is likely that the two usages of ~ in his post refer to the same thing), common sense or the assumption that Jonathan probably knows about the unary usage. (Parsing natural language is quite hard though, so I could be wrong.)

Spoken like a true human Compiler. :)

On Friday, 5 July 2013 at 18:18:14 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> It doesn't necessarily have to be ~, as long as it's something other
> than + (or any other numerical binary operator). Perl uses '.', but in
> D's case, that would be a bad idea, since you'd have ambiguity in:

Perl is my day job and I've come to strongly dislike the period for concatenation.  IMO, that the tilde is nice and visible is a strong UX argument in its favour.  Periods get used at the end of every sentence.

Full stop.  :P

-Wyatt

On Friday, July 05, 2013 22:46:59 Namespace wrote:
> On Friday, 5 July 2013 at 20:34:26 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> > On 07/05/2013 10:09 PM, Namespace wrote:
> >>> Unary ~ is bitwise not in Java and D, and he is referring to
> >>> binary
> >>> usage.
> >>> 
> >>> [...] use ~ for _any_ purpose.
> >> 
> >> I'd expected that *any* really means *any* and do not refer to binary.
> > 
> > Yes. Neither do 'use', 'for' and 'purpose'. Establishing that it is likely that ~ is referring to binary requires some more context (eg. it is likely that the two usages of ~ in his post refer to the same thing), common sense or the assumption that Jonathan probably knows about the unary usage. (Parsing natural language is quite hard though, so I could be wrong.)
> 
> Spoken like a true human Compiler. :)

LOL. Natural language is even more ambiguous than HTML, and we know how bad that can get. Every person is emitting and receiving slightly different versions of whatever natural language they're communicated in, and it's that much worse when it's pure text without body language. And that's with a _human_ deciphering it. It's a miracle that computers ever get much of anywhere with it.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Fri, Jul 05, 2013 at 03:30:07PM -0700, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Friday, July 05, 2013 22:46:59 Namespace wrote:
> > On Friday, 5 July 2013 at 20:34:26 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
> > > On 07/05/2013 10:09 PM, Namespace wrote:
> > >>> Unary ~ is bitwise not in Java and D, and he is referring to binary usage.
> > >>> 
> > >>> [...] use ~ for _any_ purpose.
> > >> 
> > >> I'd expected that *any* really means *any* and do not refer to binary.
> > > 
> > > Yes. Neither do 'use', 'for' and 'purpose'. Establishing that it is likely that ~ is referring to binary requires some more context (eg. it is likely that the two usages of ~ in his post refer to the same thing), common sense or the assumption that Jonathan probably knows about the unary usage. (Parsing natural language is quite hard though, so I could be wrong.)
> > 
> > Spoken like a true human Compiler. :)
> 
> LOL. Natural language is even more ambiguous than HTML, and we know how bad that can get. Every person is emitting and receiving slightly different versions of whatever natural language they're communicated in, and it's that much worse when it's pure text without body language. And that's with a _human_ deciphering it. It's a miracle that computers ever get much of anywhere with it.
[...]

Yeah, no kidding. Automated translation, which requires computer parsing of natural languages, is egregiously bad, mainly because it's so hard! Not only does every individual have a slightly different version of the language, but often a lot of information is inferred from context and cultural background, and context-sensitive parsing is a hard problem, and cultural background is nigh impossible to teach a machine.

For example, consider the sentence "he's such an office Romeo!". It's relatively easy to parse -- no convoluted nested subordinate clauses or anything tricky like that. But it's extremely difficult for a machine to *interpret*, because to fully understand what "office Romeo" refers to, requires a cultural background of Shakespeare, the fact that he wrote a play in which there was a character named Romeo, what the role of that character is, what that implies about his personality, how that implication about his personality translates into an office context, and what it might mean when applied to someone other than said character. How to even remotely model such a thought process in a machine is an extremely hard problem indeed!

HTML is the role model of unambiguity by comparison!


T

-- 
Arise, you prisoners of Windows
Arise, you slaves of Redmond, Wash,
The day and hour soon are coming
When all the IT folks say "Gosh!"
It isn't from a clever lawsuit
That Windowsland will finally fall,
But thousands writing open source code
Like mice who nibble through a wall. -- The Linux-nationale by Greg Baker

On Friday, 5 July 2013 at 22:49:40 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> How to even remotely model such a thought process in a machine is an
> extremely hard problem indeed!

I would posit (being a machine learning guy myself to some extent, although not natural language) that it's only an interesting problem up to a point. We have humans for understanding humans! The really interesting thing is when the computer can do something that is actually impossible for humans.

The counterargument is of course that although a human can understand 1 human very well, they're not so good at understanding a million humans a second, even very crudely (e.g. google search)

On Friday, 5 July 2013 at 22:30:20 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> LOL. Natural language is even more ambiguous than HTML, and we know how bad
> that can get. Every person is emitting and receiving slightly different
> versions of whatever natural language they're communicated in, and it's that
> much worse when it's pure text without body language. And that's with a
> _human_ deciphering it. It's a miracle that computers ever get much of
> anywhere with it.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Computers nothing. Humans have problems getting anywhere with it...

On 7/5/2013 1:39 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> And I'm certain that I've seen the unary usage of ~ before. I just couldn't
> think of it when I posted today. I really need more sleep...

Or more coffee!

On 7/5/2013 3:48 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> For example, consider the sentence "he's such an office Romeo!". It's
> relatively easy to parse -- no convoluted nested subordinate clauses or
> anything tricky like that. But it's extremely difficult for a machine to
> *interpret*, because to fully understand what "office Romeo" refers to,
> requires a cultural background of Shakespeare, the fact that he wrote a
> play in which there was a character named Romeo, what the role of that
> character is, what that implies about his personality, how that
> implication about his personality translates into an office context, and
> what it might mean when applied to someone other than said character.
> How to even remotely model such a thought process in a machine is an
> extremely hard problem indeed!

Human speech is also littered with sarcasm, meaning reversal (that's one nasty car!), meaning based on who you are, your social status, age, etc., meaning based on who the recipient is, social status, age, etc.

Etc.

I can see machine translation that is based on statistical correlation with a sufficiently large corpus of human translations, but I don't see much hope for actual understanding of non-literal speech in the foreseeable future, and I'm actually rather glad of that.

On Saturday, 6 July 2013 at 22:25:59 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/5/2013 3:48 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> For example, consider the sentence "he's such an office Romeo!". It's
>> relatively easy to parse -- no convoluted nested subordinate clauses or
>> anything tricky like that. But it's extremely difficult for a machine to
>> *interpret*, because to fully understand what "office Romeo" refers to,
>> requires a cultural background of Shakespeare, the fact that he wrote a
>> play in which there was a character named Romeo, what the role of that
>> character is, what that implies about his personality, how that
>> implication about his personality translates into an office context, and
>> what it might mean when applied to someone other than said character.
>> How to even remotely model such a thought process in a machine is an
>> extremely hard problem indeed!
>
> Human speech is also littered with sarcasm, meaning reversal (that's one nasty car!), meaning based on who you are, your social status, age, etc., meaning based on who the recipient is, social status, age, etc.
>
> Etc.
>
> I can see machine translation that is based on statistical correlation with a sufficiently large corpus of human translations, but I don't see much hope for actual understanding of non-literal speech in the foreseeable future, and I'm actually rather glad of that.

You haven't read Ray Kurzweil's latest books then or you just don't think he's right?