From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!linac!uchinews!spssig!markrose Thu Jan 16 17:21:36 EST 1992
Article 2705 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <1992Jan14.172756.46284@spss.com>
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 1992 17:27:56 GMT
References: <1992Jan14.045132.19208@oracorp.com>
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In article <1992Jan14.045132.19208@oracorp.com> daryl@oracorp.com writes:
>The fact that there are a huge number of conversations consistent with
>what has been said so far is irrelevant: the computer only needs to
>select a response that occurs in *some* conversation that agrees with
>the current conversation so far. If more than one response is possible,
>the computer just picks one. Conversations don't have to have a unique
>outcome.

Oh, come now.  Such a system would almost immediately fail the Turing test.
Picture it in operation.  Your first utterance is "Hello."  The computer
races through its database looking for conversations that begin with this
sentence.  There are rather a lot of them; it picks one at random:
"Ah, so we meet again, Professor Chung!!"  You are taken aback, not least
because your name is Daryl.

Now, the conversation "Hello."  "Ah, so we meet again, Professor Chung!"
(or rather its translation into Chinese) is indeed a possible conversation,
so it lives in the database.  But it's not appropriate.  The table lookup
algorithm is incapable of any sense of context.  There are simply too many
possible conversations at every point; all its replies will be nonsense.

And no, don't talk to me about assigning probabilities to the conversations,
either.  The next conversation you have is almost guaranteed to be unique,
and thus can't be distinguished by its probability from any other conversation.

This algorithm is hardly worth discussing, except that I already see you 
using it in another reply to argue that a machine that can converse in
Chinese is theoretically possible.  

It's kind of fun, by the way, to see how big the database might be.  Let's
limit our attention to conversations of 1 hour, and assume 1 syllable can
be pronounced per second, and that Chinese has about 500 distinct syllables
(we'll ignore tone).  I calculate about 10^2500 possible conversations.
Will our database even fit in this universe?  Can the lookup be accomplished
in the lifetime of the universe?  

(The number of reasonable conversations would of course be smaller.  However,
there is no way to characterize the set of reasonable conversations
without introducing Chinese grammatical information and real world
knowledge, the sorts of things the table-lookup machine is not supposed
to be worrying about.)


