
A 1956 encyclopaedia's view on the computer  - thomholwerda
http://www.osnews.com/story/26055/A_1956_encyclopaedia_s_view_on_the_computer
======
olavk
Regarding evolution, I believe the denial of evolution is something
characteristic for american evangelicals. Most other christian denomination
either accept evolution or doesn't really have an opinion on it, and AFAIK it
is not really a major discussion outside of the US.

~~~
mynameishere
I'm yet to meet anyone who denies evolution. It's actually a product of
strawmanism, which is absolutely an American political habit.

~~~
alinajaf
They totally exist. My dad (an Epidemiologist by trade) didn't believe in
evolution. He also wouldn't agree that gravity is the force that holds
celestial objects in orbit around each other. People can be funny like that...

~~~
joering2
Your dad is a good man. I still don't believe in evloution. Supposedly we are
related to monkeys in 98% genetically wise, but yet monkeys still have their
children. They don't give birth to human. Further, just because something is
similar doesnt mean that one come from other. Look at silver and gold
molecules-wise.

As of gravity, we still not sure what causes it and how it actually works. We
can't re-create it, we just assume how it works.

~~~
alinajaf
> Your dad is a good man.

Thanks, I'm sure he would appreciate the sentiment.

> Supposedly we are related to monkeys in 98% genetically wise, but yet
> monkeys still have their children.

We're not descended from monkeys that are alive today, just like you're not
descended from your other cousins. Modern monkeys like all creatures are at
each generation adapting to their conditions so they may evolve into something
else, but that something will be distinctly non-human. Either way, the process
would take millions of years (i.e. a monkey isn't going to suddenly give birth
to some future version of a monkey, just like you're not going to wake up one
morning with a head full of grey hair).

> As of gravity, we still not sure what causes it and how it actually works.

We've been through a few iterations and I think we have a pretty good model
for its behaviour at everything from human to interplanetary scales. As
evidence of this, in the 70s we managed to shoot a robot across the solar
system that we aimed to fly-by all of the major outer planets. It (Voyager 1)
did a spectacular job, and is now the furthest man-made object from Earth,
currently entering the interstellar space.

It would be hard for us to pull this off if our understanding of gravity (at
the aforementioned scales) was flawed.

IMHO our understanding of gravity on an interstellar or intergalactic scale is
still a work in progress, though there are a number of points in which
astrophysicists have reached consensus.

> We can't re-create it, we just assume how it works.

This is true of all natural phenomenon in the beginning stages of research and
discovery. In science the first stages are almost always 'stamp collecting',
the part where we observe phenomenon, and only then can we start making
assumptions about how they work. We create theories, test them against the
evidence, and if we're lucky we can find ways to refine them to better predict
results. If we can disprove a theory by experiment, then we have to throw it
away.

Our understanding of gravitational force (and more recently evolution) has
been refined over the past few hundred years to the point where we can start
making accurate predictions about real-world phenomenon. Everything else (from
my dad, from science teachers, from you and me) is idle chatter.

~~~
SudarshanP
Unfortunately, people who have not experienced the joy of how well models
work, have no clue how important they are. The GP may assume that "Advanced
Technology" can get you to wherever you want. For Eg. he may look at a rocket
engine and assume that you just need to start a powerful engine and keep
steering your way to your destination as you would do in a car. He knows it is
more complex that, but will probably never appreciate the fact that, if
Newton's laws of motion or gravitation were off even by a small margin, we
would never have achieved what we would have achieved. I hope more and more
people realize that science and technology is more than just advanced or
complicated.

------
ma2rten
_Human language, on the other hand, has an infinite number of "nuances", and
as such, a "translation computer will never be able to give a sufficiently
satisfying solution". Since I make my living translating texts, I can
certainly attest to this very fact._

I don't agree with that. I think machine translation is a very difficult
problem, but I don't think it is impossible. We are just getting started to do
research on it. It is only since the 90ies that we have the computing
resources which are necessary to build statistical, data-driven machine
translation software like Google Translate, and it is only since the mid-2000s
this approach became mainstream.

 _If the computer were to end up and remain in the hands of a small elite,
e.g. of a dictator, [the computer's] power will make the common man powerless
and utterly submissive. And this tyranny will be introduced under the guise of
the advancement of human well-being._

I was thinking maybe a cynical person would say that the power of the internet
is the actually is in the hands of a few right now (namely Google and
Facebook).

~~~
drostie
Bear with me, this won't seem immediately relevant, but I'll get to the point.

I have at various times created solvers and helpers for the sorts of logic
puzzles you sometimes see in newspapers alongside the crosswords -- you can
find a bunch of them online and with many of them, the limiting problem is
simply time investment for applying automatic, pithy little rules. Just as an
example, I wrote a helper script in Greasemonkey at one point for large
versions of <http://www.puzzle-loop.com/> , the rules of which are "You have
to draw lines between the dots to form a single loop without crossings or
branches. The numbers indicate how many lines surround it." It's very
satisfying to click once and then see an algorithm performing all of the
drudge-work, leaving you to focus on the really interesting bits which you
haven't yet been able to articulate as rules. One interesting problem in the
above link is knowing when you're about to create a region which only has an
odd number of ends inside of it. I found a very pretty way to do this in most
cases.

The central problem of the translation computer is that often, knowing which
translation of word W is important depends on understanding the context around
W, sometimes out a couple of sentences. The central problem of understanding
the context of W, however, would demand a much more holistic approach than the
above translation program seems to provide.

The problem in both is precisely a declarative/imperative divide. We are very
good at working out, given the adequacy conditions for the solution (the
"rules of the game"), what sorts of automatic reflex actions we can do (the
"moves" of the game, I suppose). We know the rules, we figure out the moves.
Ideally, we would like to just tell a computer the rules of chess without
specifying that there is something called 'value' of a piece, and that the
computer should find values for e.g. the loss of a knight in comparison to the
loss of a bishop. It should be able to work out the principles of effective
play, if we want true machine learning.

It is my contention, to tie this all together, that without something which
appears like machine learning, we won't have anything which appears like
machine understanding, and that a machine translation would appear like a
machine understanding, due to context-sensitivity in translation: you will
hand it "Knives were good for helping humans to hunt" and it will accidentally
translate "good" as the equivalent for "ethical" rather than the more-likely-
intended "efficient", because it correlates "helping" and "humans" with
ethics.

~~~
Retric
There are programs that given enough time will come up with piece values for
arbitrary board games like chess. Non random board games are actually one of
the easier things to translate into computer code, the problem is games like
go are inherently difficult. I suspect with perfect play the first go player
completely dominates the board just like with smaller boards that have been
solved, but the ultra aggressive gameplay required to pull this off is
impossible to pull off with any sort of reasonable hardware. So, it's really a
question of discovering heuristics that allow computationally reasonable pay
to still create an acceptable level of imperfect play, and piece values are
just one of those heuristics. Perfect play in chess can ignore positional
concepts and just look for paths that either force a checkmate or a tie.

The problem with language translation is you need to understand the context of
an idea before you can accurately translate it which is why humans have such
issues translating technical content they don't understand.

That said, humans can decode things that are close to linguistic gibberish so
even a poor translation is often good enough. Google translate is already
rather useful though a great set of heuristics despite an endless array of
edge cases it fumbles though. It's a useful path that get's ever more
expensive the more demanding the problem.

~~~
drostie
I guess maybe I wasn't clear. Some modern chess algorithms begin by telling
the computer, "here are some numbers you must determine, and how you combine
them into an assessment of the game's winnability. Go and analyze a bunch of
games and statistically determine which numbers are optimal."

To me, that phrasing is itself the problem. I should be able to just say "here
are the adequacy conditions for a solution" and then have my computer humming
away to guess and then prove possible moves which tend to quickly bring you
towards a solution.

Mind you, they don't have to be _complete_ rules that solve _every_ case --
that would probably end up implying that P = NP. But most of my logic-puzzle-
helpers begin with some sort of code which says, "here is how I will define
rules, here is how you should match against them and what you should do when
you find a match." Then I have to work out all of these rules for myself and
then tell the computer about them one-by-one.

If I could just tell my computer, "work out all of the automatic reductions
where the logic tree goes less than 20 steps, build rules for those, I will
try to handle anything more sophisticated," that would be much better. As yet
I've never seen anything like a general algorithm for this, though. :< Turning
the declarative to imperative in a portable way would simplify both these
programs that I'm writing, and machine translations, I feel.

~~~
jules
You should look into constraint satisfaction algorithms and SAT solving
algorithms. With these you can encode almost all logic puzzles meant for
humans fairly easily. For example for sudoku you just say that each cell
contains a number {1..9}, and that all the rows, columns and blocks cannot
contain duplicates. This is usually done with a declaration like
alldifferent(cell1, cell2, cell3 ..., cell9), where alldifferent is a built-in
constraint in any constraint solver worth its salt. These algorithms usually
solve the complete logic puzzle in less than a millisecond.

Note that these are algorithms for combinatorial logic problems/puzzles, not
for searching game trees.

------
zipdog
As a side note, it was only a few years before this (in 1949) that Robert Busa
approached IBM's Tom Watson with the idea of using a computer to make a
concordance (of the works of Thomas Aquinas). Tom apparently said it was
impossible (IBM was a number-crunching business, and parsing huge volumes of
text was an entirely new field). Luckily the company's motto at the time was:
“What's difficult we can do straight away, the impossible takes a little
longer”

The project is noted by many as the beginning of a computational approach to
literature.

------
antidoh
"Sadly, Van Riesen passed away in 2000, but had he still been alive, I would
have tried to get into contact with him."

Contact his students.

------
gambler
When I was reading this, I couldn't stop thinking about the fact that we no
longer have paper encyclopedias. (For the most part. There are still some, but
I think their very nature is different.) It's kind of depressing.

In 60 years, no one will write about Wikipedia articles in this key. Not just
because it's digital, but because it's biased, full of edit wars and topic
exclusions.

~~~
marquis
Exactly - I believe that there is a really interesting space to fill in the
future days to come: solving the problem of authority on a subject, without
relying on the 'social network' solution. I may be quite a few degrees away
from being friends of friends with the expert on, say, Galapagos iguanas.

------
lordlicorice
"What struck me most about the entry was Van Riesen's philosophical approach
to the matter, which is remarkably prescient of the challenges we, as the
human race, face with how to deal with the computer"

His opinion wasn't at all prescient. Computing gave unprecedented power to the
people. It has absolutely never been a source of oppression.

~~~
127
Never say never.

[http://www.npr.org/2011/12/14/143639670/the-technology-
helpi...](http://www.npr.org/2011/12/14/143639670/the-technology-helping-
repressive-regimes-spy)

------
planetguy
Y'know, for an article entitled "A 1956 encyclopaedia's view on the computer"
I was kinda hoping for something that included more than one paragraph of
quotes from the 1956 encyclopaedia.

~~~
floomp
The text is probably still copyrighted. I'm not a lawyer, but I imagine
creative paraphrasing of the original work with small excerpts is much
preferable, legally, to wholesale copying.

~~~
drostie
More importantly, if you read the article, the text is in Nederlands and the
more you excerpt, the more you will have to translate.

