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Comment by avip | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget Trurl's electronic bard, which had now existed for years.

Also, a surprisingly accurate description of the Machine Learning (to be exact, reinforcement learning) process from the story "Ananke" inside https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Pirx_the_Pilot written in 60s/70s.

The Pirx stories, esp. Ananke and The Haunt are among my favourite short stories of all time. I've always seen them as parables rather than Sci Fi novels, because in the end the "problem" is always human nature, not technology per se. The're also parables in the sense that Lem wrote about political things he couldn't address directly in the political climate at the time.

I love Pirx and having a Polish connection in my life I think gave me a richer appreciation even of a translation. Definitely going to check out more Lem after reading this thread. And can't agree more on Lem's prescience - the lovely thing is that my enjoyment whilst reading was never broken by picking holes in the descriptions around technology. Thank you Lem.

I use that story as an example of how hard it is to automate translation of poetry. I don't have an original Polish copy, but my friend and I have compared his Hungarian translation to my English one. The poems are very different, but the intent of them is there.

Lem's brilliant English translator, Michael Kandel, wanted to adapt the The Cyberiad as an animated film, using CGI (this was pre-Toy Story!) Lem never agreed, but he never entirely rejected the idea either.

I saw some clips that had been created as demos, probably in the early 1990s. My recollection is that even by the animation standards of the day, it wasn't great, but there were like two guys working in their spare time without funding, and they had to invent a lot of their own tools.

Heh, I just commented[1] without having seen your comment, on the same topic. There's a link in my comment to a more literal rendition[2] of the original Polish. How does the Hungarian one pan out? :)

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16899004

2: https://medium.com/@mwichary/seduced-shaggy-samson-snored-72...

As I recall, it's about a suitcase. Every word begins with K, which is a common letter in Hungarian. The second link you give has images of many translations, including the Hungarian one. I'll see if I can get my friend to send me a literal translation.

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