

China’s Arthur C. Clarke - kercker
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/chinas-arthur-c-clarke?intcid=mod-latest

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spiritplumber
The language/alphabet barrier, as well as the censorship barrier, prevent us
from knowing China's Clarke, China's Feynman, China's Tesla maybe.

And we've come to reflexively discount anything coming out of China as
derivative.

Don't forget - China is almost 25% of the human race!

What might we in the West be missing out on?

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bane
I remember it being not _all_ that long ago, as China (and greater Asia)
ramped up on the internet, that the West was deeply concerned about the mono-
lingual Asians not being able to take advantage of all the wisdom, science and
art the West had produced.

In some ways this is true, in some ways it's self-enforced, and in some ways
the reverse is true as well.

Automatic machine translation, and query expansion was supposed to make these
inter-lingual barriers go away. But it feels like in many ways, the effort has
died. Sure you can still go to translate.google.com and put in a URL and get a
reasonable translated page back for a large number of languages. But I can't
go to google.com and put in a query for refrigerator and it brings back
matches for 冰箱 or 电冰箱 and translates those automagically. That next step just
never seemed to happen, and what were fast advances in East Asian language
machine translation just seems to have died out (Korean/Japanese <-> English
is virtually unusable).

Even within like-language groups, ones that have "good enough" translations,
this next step didn't happen. If I want to search for réfrigérateur I still
have to translate the word myself, then go back to google.com, paste the word
in and then hit "translate page" next to the search results (and hope that
chrome's automatic translation kicks in on the search results so I have some
idea what I'm clicking).

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davmre
> Automatic machine translation, and query expansion was supposed to make
> these inter-lingual barriers go away. But it feels like in many ways, the
> effort has died.

Machine translation is still very much an active area of research. It sucked
for many years as people hand-crafted more and more complicated systems; the
big breakthroughs of the past ten years or so have come from realizing that,
given very large (internet-scale) training datasets, you can apply some simple
statistical methods and do much better than the previous hard-coded methods
that couldn't exploit this wealth of data. There's been lots of tuning of the
shallow statistical approach, but my understanding is that significant further
progress will involve models that capture a deeper understanding of semantics
while still maintaining the ability to be trained from large datasets.
Identifying such models is hard and is an active area of research. Neural
networks have been receiving a lot of study recently as one possible approach
(see e.g. this demo [http://104.131.78.120/](http://104.131.78.120/) from
Yoshua Bengio's lab), but there are other avenues as well.

Basically I don't think it's accurate to say "the effort has died". Research
takes time, the technology is improving, and it's quite possible that within
another ten or fifteen years we'll be able do to the sort of seamless,
accurate translation across the Internet that you'd like to see. (translation
between European languages, which are fundamentally similar in many ways, is
already close to that point, but bridging the gap to Asian languages has been
much harder...)

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housel
I've just started reading The Three Body Problem (in a Traditional Chinese
edition, since I'm more comfortable with that than Simplified). No spoilers
please.

From my perspective, what little I've read of Chinese speculative fiction
(such as a couple of Ni Kuang novels) seems to take a bit of what I call a
"golly gee whiz" tone, making a big deal about ideas that would be old hat to
most readers of Western SF. What I've read so far of Liu Cixin seems to have a
bit of this, but perhaps not as bad; I'll see how I feel after I finish the
trilogy.

~~~
crazychrome
I stopped reading Ni Kuang's work since 14. I'd consider comparing Ni Kuang
with Liu a serious offence to Liu's readers.

In my opinion, the second and third instalments of _The Three Body Problem_
are as good as the Foundation series. The first one, really is just a trailer.

The second one, entitled _The Dark Forest_ is far more than Sci-fi.
Personally, I interpret it as a serious international political question:
could the West really tolerate any other forms of civilisation? the book gave
a negative perspective.

Claim: I live in UK and I understand most of EU folks don't like to be
simplified as _Westerners_. However, from a Chinese perspective, the cultural
differences between FR/DE/UK/CA/US/AU are invisible.

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crazychrome
I think Liu is more inline with Isaac Asimov than Arthur Clarke. Liu is
clearly an atheist and intentionally avoid _cheap_ reading gratification
achieved by science-religion association.

My complaint about Liu: he has a silly admiration towards Stephen Hawking
probably due to his obsession with black hole. (but who doesn't?) 200 years
later, people might only get to know Stephen Hawking when reading Liu's books.

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rasz_pl
Reminds me of the wast difference in style, topics and tone between western
and Eastern Bloc SCiFi writers.

I wonder if Chinese authors also try to criticise regime and socio-political
system they live in under the veil of scifi, like Janusz Zajdel in Poland
during Russian occupation.

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m0skit0
Looks like worth reading, although the themes of the novels covered in the
article look pretty much rehashed from other authors like Arthur C. Clarke of
course, but also Larry Niven comes to mind.

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fa
Bought this book, “The Three-Body Problem”!

