ekurtz99{at}WhoKnowsWhere.com wrote in
news:cdomcl$l36$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org: 

>> ekurtz99{at}WhoKnowsWhere.com wrote 
>>>The fundamental mistake here is the implcit assumption that advances
>>>in machine understanding of language are problems of storage and cpu
>>>speed; they are not; if that's all they were, machines would be able
>>>to converse at speeds slower than a human but in a realistic way.
>>>Obviously they cannot.
>> 
> William Morse wrote:
>> I realize that advances in language are more than problems of storage
>> and cpu speed. In particular, the classic computer architecture is
>> well suited to logic problems but ill suited to the kind of
>> processing involved in language. But in any case your statement is
>> incorrect. Ants cannot converse at speeds slower than a human - they
>> cannot converse at all. Even chimps can only converse haltingly after
>> much specific training. 
> 
> In the case of ants the reason is obvious; but it may that the chimp
> has enough brain matter to support language ability; but it doesn't
> have the necessary brain organization. Language is not learned in the
> way that algebra is learned; we are born with the capacity to acquire
> it from our social group.

Actually our language capability is deeper than that than that - we are 
born with the capacity to develop language based on cues that we can expect 
to receive from our social group. We do not "acquire" it in that
sense - we 
will still develop it with minimal prompting. But it was not always that 
way. The first languages probably had to be painstakingly taught to 
neophytes.

 
> It is likely that it takes a very high degree of complexity to
>> begin to converse - and current computers are nowhere close to that 
>> level. 
 
> You are once again confusing hardware with software complexity. Faster
> machines aren't necessarily more complex. Do you have a background in
> CS? 

I do not do it for a living. But I have written programs in machine 
language, Fortran, Cobol, Basic, APL, and PL-1 (I have not done any 
programming recently so I have not written in C++ or Visual Basic, and I 
never did venture into _L_ost _I_n _S_tupid _P_arentheses). I have gone 
from sliderule to desktop HP calculators using RPN to punch cards on 
various IBM and DEC systems to Apple computers with programs stored on 
cassette tapes to the current generation of PC's  using obscenely quick 
CPU's to run Linux that is based on Unix that was developed in the 60's. So 
I really don't need a lecture from you on the history of computing, 
capiche?
 
>> So it is too early to tell if advances in cpu speed and storage 
>> will eventually allow computer speech even with the current limited 
>> understanding of how language is constituted.
 
> This doesn't follow at all; suppose I believe I have figured out how
> to implement conversational ability in software. I implement my design
> in a program; I then run the program by asking it sensible real-world 
> questions; if the machine that is running the software is slow
> compared with the ideal for my system it may take (say) a month to
> respond, but the response will be no different from what I would have
> got on a much faster system, say in seconds; I can then resond to the
> response, wait another month etc etc. Conversation does not have to be
> real time. As long as the responses indicate that the system
> understood the questions and was able to construct human-like answers,
> I can claim to have cracked the problem.

OK. I do agree with you that (written) language is computable - there is an 
algorithm that can take in any string of alphanumeric characters and 
produce a response that is arbitrarily close to the response one would 
expect from a human.  But let's be realistic. If it takes a month for the 
software to produce a response, the time for the program to be debugged 
will be measured in centuries, and the software developer will give up. 

To elaborate, at some point a difference in degree becomes a difference in 
kind.  Back in the good old days of slide rules, there were problems we 
would simply not tackle because it took too long to do the calculations. 
This is the current problem in language - the computers are neither 
powerful enough nor organized in the right way to allow anyone to write 
programs to understand language - because of practical limits in how people 
do programming. 

 
Yours,

Bill Morse
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