Comment on Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 09:08:25 GMT

You know, I actually don't know!

It can't literally be impossible, because humans do it, but artificial natural language understanding seemed to me like the kind of thing that couldn't happen without either a major conceptual breakthrough or a ridiculous amount of grunt work done by humans, like the CYC project is seeking to do - input, by hand, into a database everything a typical 4-year-old might learn by experiencing the world. On the other hand, if by "natural language" you mean something like "really good Zork-style interactive fiction parser", that might be a bit less difficult than making a computer that can pass a high school English course. And I'm really boggled that a computer can play Jeopardy! successfully. Although, to really be a fair competition, the computer shouldn't be given any direct electronic inputs; if the humans have to use their eyes and ears to know what the categories and "answers" are, then the computer should have to use a video camera and microphone, too.

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