Can You Read My Math?
In the film "Colussus: The Forbin Project", there comes a time when the two computers (Colussus and Guardian) decide to abandon "our" math and invent their own more efficient symbolic communication language.
In the Star Trek Next Generation episode "11001001", the Binars communicate much more efficiently with their own binary language than humans.
This article from BusinessWeek http://businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/06_04/b3968001.htm?chan=gl reports one attempt to begin encoding all information mathematically. From the article:
"How do you convert written words into math? Goldman says it takes a combination of algebra and geometry. Imagine an object floating in space that has an edge for every known scrap of information. It's called a polytope and it has near-infinite dimensions, almost impossible to conjure up in our earthbound minds. It contains every topic written about in the press. And every article that Inform processes becomes a single line within it. Each line has a series of relationships. A single article on Bordeaux wine, for example, turns up in the polytope near France, agriculture, wine, even alcoholism. In each case, Inform's algorithm calculates the relevance of one article to the next by measuring the angle between the two lines.
By the time you're reading these words, this very article will exist as a line in Goldman's polytope. And that raises a fundamental question: If long articles full of twists and turns can be reduced to a mathematical essence, what's next? Our businesses -- and, yes, ourselves."
How will we know when the computers processing all this information begin to self organize into intelligences with their own language, one which is far superior to English or any other existing language?
We're spending a lot of time and effort to get computers to understand our language. Perhaps it is we who should be learning theirs.
In the Star Trek Next Generation episode "11001001", the Binars communicate much more efficiently with their own binary language than humans.
This article from BusinessWeek http://businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/06_04/b3968001.htm?chan=gl reports one attempt to begin encoding all information mathematically. From the article:
"How do you convert written words into math? Goldman says it takes a combination of algebra and geometry. Imagine an object floating in space that has an edge for every known scrap of information. It's called a polytope and it has near-infinite dimensions, almost impossible to conjure up in our earthbound minds. It contains every topic written about in the press. And every article that Inform processes becomes a single line within it. Each line has a series of relationships. A single article on Bordeaux wine, for example, turns up in the polytope near France, agriculture, wine, even alcoholism. In each case, Inform's algorithm calculates the relevance of one article to the next by measuring the angle between the two lines.
By the time you're reading these words, this very article will exist as a line in Goldman's polytope. And that raises a fundamental question: If long articles full of twists and turns can be reduced to a mathematical essence, what's next? Our businesses -- and, yes, ourselves."
How will we know when the computers processing all this information begin to self organize into intelligences with their own language, one which is far superior to English or any other existing language?
We're spending a lot of time and effort to get computers to understand our language. Perhaps it is we who should be learning theirs.
posted by Earl Kiech at 1:56 PM
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