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Article 4754 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: kubo@brauer.harvard.edu (Tal Kubo)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Oil for the Chinese Fire
Message-ID: <1992Mar26.235848.10325@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 27 Mar 92 04:58:47 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1992Mar26.235848.10325
References: <1992Mar23.184652.26102@psych.toronto.edu>
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Nntp-Posting-Host: brauer.harvard.edu


In article <1992Mar23.184652.26102@psych.toronto.edu> christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green) writes:
>
>During WWII, "a meesage encoded from Turkish was successfully decoded back into
>Turkish (using statistical techniques) by someone who *knew no Turkish*. (In
>fact, the decoder didn't recognize the result as a message, and believed
>he had failed). Weaver goes on to suggest that translation [of natural
>languages] might be regarded as a *species of decoding*..." (pp. 77-78)
>

In WWII, Yardley, working for US intelligence, decoded Japanese messages
into English without knowing any Japanese.

As for translation as decoding: barring an existence proof for one-way
functions, there is no criterion to distinguish decoding from *any*
operation whatsoever.

>-- 
>Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
>Psychology Department               cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
>University of Toronto
>---------------------

-tal  kubo@zariski.harvard.edu


