You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

JoshuaZ comments on Asking Precise Questions - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: paulfchristiano 03 January 2011 08:48AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (34)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 03 January 2011 11:39:22AM 0 points [-]

2 seem to not be necessarily easily specified (what humans mean by "translate" is complicated and differs from person to person. Consider translating poetry or puns. Or translating "this sentence would be difficult to translate into Japanese" (due to Douglas Hofstadter). I'd also be worried about a sufficiently smart UFAI embedding something clever if it was allowed to give that much output data that people would be widely exposed to.

Comment author: TheOtherDave 03 January 2011 03:09:24PM 1 point [-]

METEOR is intended precisely to specify a meaning of "translate" that maps non-horribly to human intuitions about it. It's imperfect, granted, but WrongBot is not ignoring the problem.

An AI capable of embedding something into text that cleverly hacks human minds ought be able to understand vague requests, and ought not need humans to pose it questions in the first place.

Comment author: magfrump 03 January 2011 06:43:37PM -1 points [-]

"this sentence would be difficult to translate into Japanese"

この文は日本語に翻訳しにくい

Even babelfish gets that one right.

Admittedly there are other levels of formality and synonyms that could be used for difficult, but there are other sentences in English meaning the same thing as well.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 04 January 2011 03:24:11AM 1 point [-]

Even babelfish gets that one right.

Missing the point. The sentence's nature changes when translated. Once it is in Japanese the sentence doesn't make any sense. So something is lost in the translation.

Incidentally, Hofstadter ran into precisely this issue when the French edition of GEB was being written. In GEB he uses the version "This sentence would be very difficult to translate into French." The problem then became what to do in the French version. They made instead a French sentence which declares itself to be difficult to translate into English.