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Comment by jorleif | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit strange to compare Google's language understanding to that of a human, since Google does not really understand language, as much as is able to return documents that are about the same thing as the person writing a query intends. Surely, a two-year old understands negation just fine, while Google does not.

Google's understanding of language is similar to that of a savant who has been imprisoned since birth and has been tied to a bench in front of a screen showing texts of the web. He can't read in the sense that he could pronounce words, but he recognizes familiar patterns of symbols. He does not know what "pancakes" are, but he knows that the word is often seen with the word "butter". It's amazing how much can be done in this way, but it is quite different from how humans understand.

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> Surely, a two-year old understands negation just fine, while Google does not

Nope. As I read the article, I thought "Cool! it has trouble with negation, just like my 2 year old." A few months ago, it was obvious that if I said "Don't do X", she'd just match on "X", and do the thing. E.g. "Don't poke your eyes" => pokes eyes.

She's starting to get the hang of it now, but I can see how confusing it is for her.

EDIT>

Also, babies can understand a lot before they're able to compose language. E.g. "bring me your shoes" ... brings shoes. "Give that to Mommy." ... gives thing to Mom.

It's all about the FedEx quests, initially.

Also, babies can understand a lot before they're able to compose language.

My son told his first joke before he could form sentences. He was about 10 months old; I was getting him dressed, lying on the changing table. "OK, give me your hand." He lifted up one hand so I could put it into the sleeve. "And now your other hand." He got this sly grin and lifted his foot.

That's not exactly telling s joke. That's playful behavior. Play is at the very core of human interaction. It's a powerful mechanism for learning because teacher (you) is kept entertained, and therefore more willing to continue the learning for longer.

Enh, borderline. I think of it as a pun.

>> Google does not really understand language

I used to believe, like you do, that the ability to parse and make decisions based on input was not the same thing as understanding.

Then, I wrote a chess bot for a CS lab. The thing plays better than me, better than it's peers. My partner, who was good at chess (or at least very literate in it) could identify what strategies it was going for. We had a visualization of what moves it was considering, and you could see that it was essentially playing chess by swinging a baseball bat around and seeing what looked nice.

Does the chessbot "understand" chess? It sure seems like it. We like to think humans are special, and have some kind of unique understanding that computers can't, but I think it's only us lying to ourselves.

I dunno, for me "understanding" something implies an ability to reason about your reasoning. a rule-based AI can't do that, and even if interesting patterns emerge, it's still deterministic.

This point crosses into the realm of metaphysics and philosophy because it's entirely possible that more than just google's AI is deterministic. Besides, as input for the AI they are using the behavior of the millions of google users. Its likely as deterministic as you or I.

In a way, when a chess master thinks about a position, they can see many many moves ahead, in an innate feeling kind of way about what is a good and bad position. I think you could say that a human is better at aggressive pruning using better common sense whereas a computer can be just as good, it has to examine the billion or more positions though.

Nice point, but that was not what I was getting at. The chess bot can see the whole chess field and "knows" how the pieces moves. The difference with google, is that google does not see the meanings of the words (or the entities that the words refer to), just the words. I don't mean to say that humans are special when it comes to language, just that humans have a lot of information (world knowledge) about words that google cannot pick up just by looking at the words themselves. If we manage to capture that information, then I think a computer can also understand language.

As it relates to the Turing test, this is called the Chinese Room example/argument.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

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