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Article 4822 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: kubo@widder.harvard.edu (Tal Kubo)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Oil for the Chinese Fire
Message-ID: <1992Mar30.091732.10454@husc3.harvard.edu>
Date: 30 Mar 92 14:17:31 GMT
Lines: 65
Nntp-Posting-Host: widder.harvard.edu


In article <1992Mar28.105106.10370@husc3.harvard.edu>
zeleny@zariski.harvard.edu (Mikhail Zeleny) writes: 
>In article <1992Mar26.235848.10325@husc3.harvard.edu> 
>kubo@brauer.harvard.edu (Tal Kubo) writes:
>>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.
>
>Neat.  References?

I'll check and post.  

>>As for translation as decoding: barring an existence proof for one-way
>>functions,
>
>Some of my bodily functions seem to be one-way...

Not into yogic meditation? ("mmm, that tastes good")

>
>>	    there is no criterion to distinguish decoding from *any*
>>operation whatsoever.
>
>Loss of information?

As with most functions, the image contains less information
than the source.  What's special about decoding?
                                       ^^^^^^^^^
 [this corrects my previous posting, which had "translation" here]
                             
>
>>>Christopher D. Green                christo@psych.toronto.edu
>
>>-tal  kubo@zariski.harvard.edu
>
>Good to see you back.

Good to hear from you.

>
>
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>: Mikhail Zeleny                                                     :
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-tal


