Comment by hacker_9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hacker_9 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the Wolfram Language is very much a LISP dialect, with the syntax swizzled a bit here and there to be a bit more human readable.

Also his Riffle example is thinking about the problem the wrong way round. It looks like he tried to turn code into english, when it should be the other way around. Here is an actual english version:

  1. Start with a purple square
  2. Clone the square, rotate it by 0.1 radians and scale it to fit the previous square
  3. Also alternate the colour between purple and yellow.
  4. repeat clone process until square is just a dot in the middle of the screen

Note how easy it was to understand what I meant, and yet a computer would fail at so many of the instructions: scale how? how to test if it fits? alternate whose colour? repeat what steps? 'clone process'? clone same square or newest created square? what defines a dot? screen? middle?

All these ambiguities we can solve, but a computer cannot hence why our programming languages are so specific to the point of cognitive overload. Also none of his later examples show to me that Wolfram is better than English, unless of course you use wolfram daily (as he 'the creator' likely does/did), in which case you're brain is already optimized to read it...

This isn't even mentioning that language is only part of how we communicate. We can often leave so much out because our visual system, body movements, previous experiences, memory and other senses fill in the rest.

> All these ambiguities we can solve

We can solve it by specify what each word means. That's no different than programming.

Also, your step 4 has bug because "repeating the clone process" does not include "rotating and scale it to fit" part. It'll just keep cloning the square all days and never get the square to be the size of a dot.

Also, If you screen is not a square and you did not start in the center of the screen. Then the square can be as small as a dot, but it won't be "in the middle of the screen".

Joesb if anything you are proving my point! As another human you saw large ambiguities in my instructions but could still figure out 1. the problems (you knew no one would clone the square infinitely as it wouldn't 'make sense') and 2. the required solutions (i probably meant scale+rotate as well to be included in the cloning process, otherwise no interesting visual change would happen).

Tell me what programming language / compiler can do that by just specifying word meanings? Context, sentence structure, your understanding, etc all play into it as well.

are ambiguities only meaningful to humans?

Seems to me that computers were instructed to (1) refuse to work in front of ambiguities, or (2) resolve them by choosing one of the options.

Kind of like when `yacc` tells you that some rule is ambiguous, but then it ends up resolving it by deterministically picking always the same option.

we don't know how to make computers understand ambiguities, that is the problem. Yacc always selecting the first option isn't necessarily right nor how we would solve the problem, we choose the option that makes the most 'sense'.

Of course what is 'common sense'? Something that only comes about when you have a billion neurons doing your calculations perhaps.

Also if computers had human level understanding we wouldn't need Yacc rules at all; we can recognize from 100's of different languages just by looking at them, even partial code, despite all the ambiguity of putting all programming languages into one Yacc grammar.

> Seems to me that computers were instructed to (1) refuse to work in front of ambiguities

No, that would presume incorrectly that it understood what ambiguity was or even knew it was in an ambiguous situation. Computers don't refuse anything, they do exactly what they're told and only what they're told even when what they're told doesn't make any sense.

> resolve them by choosing one of the options.

They don't even know there are options.

> We can solve it by specify what each word means.

The word that's going to cause the most trouble is probably "it". What does "it" mean? In this specification, it means the cloned square. But in a longer specification (written in this style), the meaning of "it" will depends on which instance of the word we're talking about, because what it refers to keeps changing...

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