
In the 17th Century, Leibniz Dreamed of a Machine That Could Calculate Ideas - sohkamyung
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/robotics/artificial-intelligence/in-the-17th-century-leibniz-dreamed-of-a-machine-that-could-calculate-ideas
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YeGoblynQueenne
The intersting thing is that today's NLP has nothing to do with the
manipulation of symbols, as such. Rather, NLP is performed (lately) by neural
networks, that learn to optimise the parameters of continuous functions. NLP
is possible in this way because by construction, the parameters of the
functions to be optimised are associated to the elements of natural language
(characters, mostly, but sometimes words). So an NLP "machine" nowadays means
a machine that can predict the next character (or word) in a sequence.

Leibniz's ideas on the other hand, of combining symbols to generate and
evaluate human language, that's the spirit that permeates Good, Old-Fashioned
AI, symbolic, and logic-based artificial intelligence. Today, most NLP
researchers would say that the logic-based branch of research, common as it
was until very recently, was after all a dead end that did not lead anywhere.
It would be interesting to be able to know what Leibniz would have made of
that.

Perhaps one day (in the far distant future, when my bones are dust and my
memories lost) we'll be able to reproduce the great philosopher's thoughts
from his writings and reconstruct his personality, in part or in whole. And
then we could pose to him the question: "Master, what do you think of the
machine that now houses your intellect"?

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goldenkey
There are binary/discrete neural networks. :-)

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YeGoblynQueenne
Well, the original artificial neuron by Pitts and McCulloch was a
propositional logic circuit- but that strain of research, too, has fallen by
the wayside in favour of neural nets that can be trained with backpropagation
of error.

~~~
goldenkey
One can train binary NN via backprop by using qbits. Samples are taken, and
backprop can be done as if the result was X% 1 and (1-X)% 0. It can be noisy
and slow but it is a way to do it.

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wrp
Description of his interest in mechanized reasoning generally ignores the
other half of his proposed project, which was to create a database of
propositions for the machine to operate on. His idea was along the lines of
Doug Lenat's Cyc, to represent all of human knowledge in propositional form.
As I recall, in his grant proposal to the French court, he estimated that it
would take a small group of clerks about 5 years to complete the job. The
French didn't express any interest.

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aasasd
With the early start of 350 years, we could probably have a sizeable
compendium going on by now. After all, much of human knowledge only began to
be created at that time.

Maybe mathematical notation would also be established earlier―after the clerks
would get tired of spelling it out.

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jasim
Leibniz: 'What a watch is to time, this engine is to thought.'

Daniel Waterhouse: 'Sir! You show me a few gears that add and multiply numbers
– well enough. But this is not the same as thought !'

'What is a number, Mr. Waterhouse?'

Daniel groaned. 'How can you ask such questions?'

'How can you not ask them, sir? You are a philosopher, are you not?'

'A Natural Philosopher.'

'Then you must agree that in the modern world, mathematicks is at the heart of
Natural Philosophy – it is like the mysterious essence in the core of the
snowflake. When I was fifteen years old, Mr. Waterhouse, I was wandering in
the Rosenthal – which is a garden on the edge of Leipzig – when I decided that
in order to be a Natural Philosopher I would have to put aside the old
doctrine of substantial forms and instead rely upon Mechanism to explain the
world. This led me inevitably to mathematicks.'

'When I was fifteen, I was handing out Phanatiqual libels just down the street
from here, and dodging the Watch – but in time, Doctor, as Newton and I
studied Descartes at Cambridge, I came to share your view concerning the
supreme position of mathematics.'

'Then I repeat my question: What is a number? And what is it to multiply two
numbers?'

'Whatever it is, Doctor, it is different from thinking .'

'Bacon said, ‘Whatever has sufficient differences, perceptible by the sense,
is in nature competent to express cogitations.' You cannot deny that numbers
are in that sense competent – '

'To express cogitation, yes! But to express cogitations is not to perform
them, or else quills and printing-presses would write poetry by themselves.'

'Can your mind manipulate this spoon directly?' Leibniz said, holding up a
silver spoon, and then setting it down on the table between them.

'Not without my hands.'

'So, when you think about the spoon, is your mind manipulating the spoon?'

'No. The spoon is unaffected, no matter what I think about it.'

'Because our minds cannot manipulate physical objects – cup, saucer, spoon –
instead they manipulate symbols of them, which are stored in the mind.'

'I will accept that.'

'Now, you yourself helped Lord Chester devise the Philosophical Language,
whose chief virtue is that it assigns all things in the world positions in
certain tables – positions that can be encoded by numbers.'

'Again, I agree that numbers can express cogitations, through a sort of
encryption. But performing cogitations is another matter entirely!'

'Why? We add, subtract, and multiply numbers.'

'Suppose the number three represents a chicken, and the number twelve the
Rings of Saturn – what then is three times twelve?'

'Well, you can't just do it at random, ' Leibniz said, 'any more than Euclid
could draw lines and circles at random, and come up with theorems. There has
to be a formal system of rules, according to which the numbers are combined.'

'And you propose building a machine to do this?'

'Pourquoi non? With the aid of a machine, truth can be grasped as if pictured
on paper.'

\-- Quicksilver, Baroque Cycle (#1), Neal Stephenson

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arethuza
For any fans of the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon, I can _strongly_
recommend _Fall; or, Dodge in Hell_.

~~~
phaedrus
I'm currently reading _Fall; or, Dodge in Hell_ as my _first_ Neal Stephenson
book. I will say the plot summary doesn't do it justice. Regarding the setting
the in mid-point of the story, with the split between reality-based social
media feed individuals and fear/meme-based feed populations - I went from an
initial reaction of "that could never happen" to a feeling of a realization
"that is _already_ happening". Especially as I was listening to the audiobook
while on a long drive through a semi-rural part of the state to visit
relatives who would definitely fall into the latter category.

~~~
arethuza
The audiobook version of the Baroque Cycle is also extremely good - quite long
though (mind you I've listened to it all at least 3 times).

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martythemaniak
There's a great line by the character of Nicola Tesla in The Prestige. "Man's
reach exceeds his grasp, and his grasp exceeds his nerve"

People like Leibniz, Babbage and others could imagine and reason about
computers, though it was impossible for to even guess at the consequences of
them. But things have not changed. Today we can similarly forsee things far
beyond our lives, planetary colonization, star travel, uploading brains, etc.
But though we can see them, it is similarly impossible to forsee the
consequences of these developments. Which is great. The future would be a very
boring place otherwise.

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dwheeler
Modern logic and set theory meets some of the requirements of this. At the
time, he did not have for-all, exists, and so on. Leibnitz himself created
some proofs with the limited logic of his day. Nowadays much more can be done.
It's not as all-encompassing, but it is a step forward.

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chopin
I'm getting a 418 for this page (Firefox and Chrome). First time I encountered
this :-).

~~~
coldcode
I'm a teapot? That's what 418 is.

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tudorw
Interesting, at what point do we let AI contribute new words to the lexicon,
Shakespeare managed 15...

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pilsetnieks
I thought it was a misconception that Shakespeare added so much new words -
him being a prolific and very popular writer, and with much of his corpus
surviving to this day, his works get cited whenever there's a "first use"
mentioned somewhere.

The fact that one of his plays is the oldest written source where a word was
seen for the first time in written form doesn't mean that it wasn't in common
use before that; indeed it could mean the opposite – because the spectators of
his plays should be able to understand what the characters are speaking, not
leave befuddled in need of translation.

~~~
tudorw
Sure, it's contentious, what's not contentious is that our lexicon grows over
time, how would an AI go about inventing a new word?

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ncmncm
The same ways we do: by scissors-and paste with parts of other words. Most if
our English words are small alterations of proto-indo-european words.

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yters
We have the idea of infinity. It'll take awhile for a machine to calculate
that idea.

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gpderetta
Calculemus!

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tetkuso
artificial language school

