From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff Tue Jan 21 09:26:47 EST 1992
Article 2847 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Table-lookup Chinese speaker
Message-ID: <6010@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 17 Jan 92 21:10:28 GMT
References: <8dRT90C00Uh7M4Gr8l@andrew.cmu.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 42

In article <8dRT90C00Uh7M4Gr8l@andrew.cmu.edu> fb0m+@andrew.cmu.edu (Franklin Boyle) writes:
>Jeff Dalton writes:
>
>>>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.
> 
>>Don't be so sure of that.  Consider, where P is a person and C the computer:
> 
>>P: Hello.
> 
>>C: Ah, so we meet again, Professor Chung!
> 
>>P: I'm not Professor Chung!
> 
>>C: My mistake.  I'm sorry, Professor Han!
> 
>>P: But I'm not Han either!  Are you blind?
> 
>>C: I didn't think so, but I'm certainly having some trouble.
>
>Actually, on a slightly different thread, given my discussion with Daryl
>McCullough about his digestion analogy and the requirements one
>stipulates for testing (and since he brought up the database of 
>possible conversations), the above does not seem like a "sensible"
>(Daryl's characterization) conversation with a computer given the 
>input/output limitations. Through a teletype, the computer (or a human 
>at the other end) could not tell who was saying hello. So, a more likely
>sensible conversation that would be stored would be: 
>"Hello." "Hello, could you please identify yourself?"
>Sensibility also means conforming with the communication channel.

True.  But perhaps there's still room for us to agree that the
computer would have various ways to recover, even if the conversation
got off to a bad start.  Even the fragment above could be rescued,
I suspect.  In many cases, at least, for things to get really weird
the person has to make some odd moves as well.  For instance, why
did "P" say "Are you blind?"?

-- jd


