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Comment by eindiran | Hacker News Reader

The second one means "the enemy successfully got several of our aircrafts".

Specifically, definition 3a or 3b for the verb form here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/land

So potentially the enemy captured the aircraft (3a) or destroyed them (3b).

Would a native English speaker use the word "landed" in this way? In the context of aircraft? "Landed" is badly ambiguous here and several distinct meanings are plausible. Captured is the most natural word given your interpretation.

Honestly that sentence -- the use of landed and that awful plural -- approaches engrish. Is that deliberate or is the use of English here just badly flawed? I can't see any other possibilities.

I think it's archaic; in the past a fishing reference would have been more common and widely understood.

I guess it annoys me because I suspect that if this is the sort of borderline incoherence one must wade through I would probably score below average.

Or just average. There's contextual dependencies in most speech, and (as displayed in this subthread) not every speaker of a language has the same context. It's a fallacy to think that if you lack context for one of the examples, you will automatically score less than average -- other people may miss context for things obvious to you.

There are a lot of native English speakers in the world and not all of them use the same idioms that you do. This seems like perfectly valid English to me; some other words that could be used instead of “landed” in the aircraft sentence include “bagged”, “nabbed”, “poached”, “got” and “did in”. One of the entertaining aspects of English is the multitude of ways it can be used.

Those are all good synonyms for "got" in the context of shooting at things. But none of the others already has a strong meaning in the context of aircraft, and this other meaning does create some confusion, which is why many speakers would avoid it (if thinking clearly).

On the other hand they might go out of their way to use it to take advantage of the word play.

I wouldn't use it that way myself, but at the same time the intended meaning is clear as day to me from the context. I'm surprised by the reactions. "Enemy" should give it away immediately.

I'm surprised too. This algorithm is about understanding language, and surely that includes understanding the intended usage. This is something humans have to do all the time. So what if there isn't a formally archived consensus on the definition of "landed" as used in the example. The intended meaning is clear, and so hats off to the algorithm for rolling with it, that is in my mind the fundamental goal of understanding language.

It's more or less impressive depending on whether the algorithm already ate a dictionary; then it's the difference between inferring from context, as people do, and simply knowing all of the known unconventional usages in a very inhuman way.

I don't know. I guess I understood the sentence with 'landed' the same as I would have if someone told me that they'd 'landed a big job'. I wouldn't really say this myself though, although I hear people say 'landed a big catch' when they're talking about fishing.

Landed, with this meaning, is used in the context of successfully enticing someone to give you something. Like hooking a fish with bait.

FWIW, Landing a fish is not the same as hooking it. Landing a fish literally means pulling it to land (or boat).

So landing=catching=scoring.

Depending on the type of fishing, you can still be an underdog to land the fish after hooking it.

Possibly, you could say the planes were landed, as in forced to stay on the ground (because of damage, fear of enemy fire, or damage to the runway). But grounded would be better.

I don't think anyone would use that particular construction, unless it's some weird dialect of pilot-speak or argot among anti-aircraft folk that I'm not aware of. It's just really awkward and unnatural. Possibly correct, but not the way that anybody actually talks.

For me, this context sounds like "damaged, but in a minor way which forced them to leave the battle/exercise/war/whatever and go land"

If taking the "captured" interpretation, I think it could be reasonably inferred that they successfully landed the aircraft at an airfield afterwards (same meaning). This was my initial read of it and it does not seem strange to me on reflection.

I would like also to point out that even if we do interpret the second as meaning "destroyed", the first could then be interpreted as a combat aviator shooting down an opposing aircraft, bringing us back to the same meaning. Or perhaps both of my interpretations are correct and the meanings are different...

What this tells me is that the benchmark is not very useful.

Landed in the sense of a fisherman landing a marlin.

So at the end of the process they were in possession of the enemy aircraft. Maybe they jumped across in mid-air and wrestled it off the other pilot.

The benchmark is useful primarily because it puts humans and computers on a level playing field. Human readers will misinterpret written language, and human writers will poorly represent concepts.

The propensity to make mistakes in comprehension is unavoidable, humans only approach 90% accuracy, and computers are getting close to the same level of accuracy on the same base materials as humans.

The other way of testing would be to devise a test where there is only a single interpretation, where the context is clear, and there is no ambiguity in meaning. In that case a competent human and computer algorithm could be expected to answer all questions perfectly.

The purpose of this benchmark on the other hand is to test comprehension when meaning is not explicit and context clues are implied, something humans have had the advantage at over computers until quite recently. The computer won't be 100% accurate, but that's not the purpose of this test.

My immediate thought was captured ie. "Iran successfully landed our UAV by transmitting false GPS data".

This language is used on the Wikipedia page about that incident.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran–U.S._RQ-170_incident

Aircraft typically get captured on the ground, or get forced to land by threat of being shot down. “Landed”, for me, would require the enemy to actively land the plane, just as “landing a fish” requires both the fisherman’s action and moving the fish from water to land.

I also wouldn’t use “landed” for destroying an enemy plane (neither by shooting it down nor by destroying it on the ground)

That, realistically, leaves hacking the plane’s electronics and then directing it to one’s own airfield.

Yes -- if the sentence had been "grounded the aircraft", then the meaning is obvious. But even though "land" is a synonym for "ground" I don't think there's an equivalence of meaning here. I'm struggling to find a sense in which "landing and enemy aircraft" is a meaningful concept short of jumping out of one plane to land on another one, removing the pilot, and landing the plane, which is a bit much for the single word "landed" to carry.

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