in a recent
profile
of the creator of
alice
, richard wallace, we learn that he finds human’s collective
conversational capability to, er, lack in complexity:
“Wallace had hit upon a theory that makes educated,
intelligent people squirm: Maybe conversation simply isn’t that
complicated. Maybe we just say the same few thousand things to one
another, over and over and over again. If Wallace was right, then
artificial intelligence didn’t need to be particularly intelligent
in order to be convincingly lifelike. A.I. researchers had been
focused on self-learning ”neural nets” and mapping out grammar in
”natural language” programs, but Wallace argued that the reason
they had never mastered human conversation wasn’t because humans
are too complex, but because they are so simple.”
and in related linguistics news, our humble
lexicon puts
kevin
bacon to shame
:
“Word association can link just about any two common
words in the English language using an average of three steps, says
a team of scientists in Arizona.”“he small-world network also means that apparently quite different
concepts, such as ‘actor’ and ‘universe’, are closely linked by a
short series of semantic steps. This, say the researchers, makes it
easier for us to carry out mental searches when using language – we
can get to our intended destination quickly, regardless of our
starting point. A database cross-referenced in this way would be
relatively easy to search computationally.”
so we’re optimized to not have to thing very
hard about a limited number of conversational topics? sounds about
right.