John Cartmell wrote:
In article , Richard Conway
wrote:

On that topic, I have a theory that in order to create the ultimate AI
computer, all that is needed it to write a program that allows the machine
to cross reference unknown words in text files. Then simply feed the
entire contents of the OED into it and let it site there for a bit while
it cross references every word in it. It will then be able to
reccursively cross-reference every word and gain total and utter
comprehension of the English language.


30 years ago that's what we thought. Then computers started to get fast enough
to do a very small amount of that task and we realised that each word didn't
need simple hooks to other words but a whole word-specific program of their
own. AI (true AI) is now further away than it was in the late seventies. ;-(

I suppose the problem is that even if it could cross reference all the
words, it still wouldn't actually know what any of them mean.

I don't know how she worked it out - or how much it was deliberate - but my 14
month old granddaughter calls our small dogs 'dog' and her own (much larger)
dog 'dog-dog'. One of us swears that, on seeing a horse, she called it
'dog-dog-dog'. Now tell me how you'd program a computer to produce the
possible grammar behind that!

You'd have to create an algorithm that took factors such as the
dimensions and mass of an animal and output the word dog x number of
times as a result!