A 1956 encyclopaedia's view on the computer

http://www.osnews.com/story/26055/A_1956_encyclopaedia_s_view_on_the_computer

by thomholwerda • 14 years ago

120 79 14 years ago

olavk2• 14 years ago

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.

facorreia2• 14 years ago

As a Brazilian Catholic, that is my impression too. This supposed incompatibility is mainly perceived by Americans.

rbanffy3• 14 years ago

Most Brazilian Catholics are a very pragmatic bunch. Most believe in reincarnation.

lucian19002• 14 years ago

Christian Orthodox people are another group that oppose evolution strongly, but they have a tendency to be less vocal.

entropy_• 14 years ago

Wait, do you speak of the Eastern Orthodox Church[1]?

I'm middle eastern(Lebanese to be precise) and a very large segment of the Christian population here belongs to various Orthodox churches(Greek, Antiochian, Armenian and Syriac) and none of them, to my knowledge at least -- and I've talked to quite a few priests and bishops having worked as a missionary in Aleppo for a year -- deny evolution. I have never heard a single teaching in church(or outside of it by some church official) that denied evolution. In fact, those I've talked to who were versed on the subject usually treated evolution as fact. None of the whole "theory" hogwash.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Orthodox_Church

mhurron• 14 years ago

You might want to expand your world view. Stupid is not the unique domain of the US.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/south-korea-evolut...

"The country’s [South Korea] anti-evolutionary sentiment appears to already be widespread within the schooling system, with a recent survey of trainee teachers in the country revealing half of those questioned disagreed with the statement that “modern humans are the product of evolutionary processes”.

marquis2• 14 years ago

I've noted this phenomenon around the world in mostly English-speaking countries, where it appears to have historically been derived from American Evangelism, due to access to certain literature, films and song (i.e. culture). South Korea, I imagine, has had a lot of input from the U.S.

olavk2• 14 years ago

Who said it was stupid? Evangelicalism is one of the fastest growing Christian denominations AFAIK, so arguably it is a quite successful belief. Of course it is unscientific, but that is a different issue. It might be smart to deny science depending on what you want to achieve.

I don't know much about religion in South Korea, but I would assume that the denialism is due to American influence, since it seems to be a recent phenomenon (according to the article). Jehovas Witnesses is another world-wide movement that denies evolution, and it also originated in the US.

jeltz• 14 years ago

Stupid is not unique to any country or culture. But each culture breeds its own stupidities. The modern denial of evolution seems to be of American origin since it is only widespread in with large American influence. The South Korean evangelicals draw much of their ideas from American evangelicals.

brass92• 14 years ago

Quoting from the article:

>>In South Korea 26 percent of the population belong to a Christian denomination...

>> Creationism in South Korea gained more attention following the 1980 World Evangelisation Crusade, which was held in Seoul. The following year, the Korea Association for Creation Research was setup. The association’s website stays up to date with current evolutionary research, publishing news stories that often state the facts as published, before going on to poke holes in the results, point out that “accidents” of “random mutations” were surely by design, before finishing off with a few references to “the Creator”.

Looks like a direct import of American evangelism to a distant land...

mynameishere• 14 years ago

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

planetguy2• 14 years ago

Shrug. They're out there somewhere, though I have yet to meet one either.

> strawmanism, which is absolutely an American political habit

I'm sure you could delete the word "American" from that sentence and it would be just as accurate.

alinajaf5• 14 years ago

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...

Lambdanaut• 14 years ago

Really? Almost everyone I grew up with didn't believe in evolution. It was far more difficult to find somebody that accepted it than to find somebody that denied it.

I grew up near Jacksonville, FL. A pretty big city, but I've recently moved to NC, and the problem isn't much alleviated up here.

majormajor• 14 years ago

For my first ten years of school, I was at a small private Christian school that taught science from a series of "Science for Christian Schools" books. The world was only thousands of years old, etc. It's not a strawman.

jsjohns2• 14 years ago

Selection bias much? It's very common in the South.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/114544/darwin-birthday-believe-ev...

opminion• 14 years ago

During my first trip abroad, within Europe, I had an embarrassing moment when telling a new friend (from Bahamas) about an embarrassing moment I had when telling a new friend (from US) that I once met someone who was a creationist.

They were all...

alinajaf5• 14 years ago

As a species we haven't had that long to get used to the idea. I hope sincerely that we will have all the denial out of our system in a few hundred years time.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

It's not really the denial of evolution, it's the selective denial of the scientific community's ability to understand the world. Especially where it would be inconvenient.

seanmcdirmid• 14 years ago

This is very uninformed and related to a US-centric view of the world: there is plenty of ignorance and opinions to go around outside of the states. The issue is only so visible in the states because we are so divided, go to other countries outside of the 1st world/Europe and consensus is often toward creationism; there is not much controversy.

esbwhat• 14 years ago

I agree the fact that it's very hotly debated in the US is part of what makes the US such an infamous example of this irrationality, but I would say the fact that the US is a scientifically advanced first world country definitely also contributes to why this is a phenomenon to so many people. Third world countries don't exactly have the best education system. The US (even though it gets a lot of slack) still has a comparably very good one, that should reach beyond "god put us on the earth with magic, the end".

And it does reach beyond that, the whole "teach the controversy" is an eccentricism of an otherwise science-based curriculum.

lotharbot5• 14 years ago

> "I believe the denial of evolution is something characteristic for american evangelicals."

It's pretty easy to trace the history of this belief.

In the late 1800s, a movement sprang up primarily in the US called "Liberal Christianity", which at its most extreme treated the Bible as essentially a useful and unreliable fairy tale. In response to this, a countermovement called "Christian Fundamentalism" arose, which at its most extreme treated the Bible (typically King James Version) as completely literal and completely perfect, and viewed any study of external data (like manuscripts or culture) with great suspicion. Fundamentalism became fairly influential in American Evangelical circles, even among those who did not explicitly adopt the title Fundamentalist.

As a result of the rise of Fundamentalism, the idea of a literal six-day creation becameentrenched in the US, which directly led to the rejection of the theories Darwin had recently proposed regarding speciation.

When I say the literalist belief became entrenched, I do not mean to say it was nonexistent before, only that it was rare. Various non-literal understandings of the creation account can be found throughout Christian history. For example, Augustine's treatise on Genesis 1 [0] is quite allegorical.

[0] http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf101.toc.html - from where the word "Genesis" first appears on the page, down to where the list of names starts, you can click through to read each individual paragraph/section.

ma2rten4• 14 years ago

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).

johnchristopher• 14 years ago

That cynical person would confuse the internet with its usage :)

The internet will still be there when AOL and netscape are gone.

ma2rten4• 14 years ago

I don't think a couple of network hubs and cables is what most people would refer to as the internet, e.g. "I went on the internet to find it", "I posted it on the internet".

PostOnce• 14 years ago

I would imagine he/she was referring to the power of Google and Facebook to analyze & exploit the data of billions of people, something that is perhaps uniquely available to them, that the average man will never obtain or have access to this data

drostie4• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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.

ma2rten4• 14 years ago

The thing is this: the first generation of machine translation system were hard coded systems that translated a string in one language into a string in another language using a set of hard coded rules. These systems were bad at the sort of semantic ambiguities that you describe. Also they tended to give too literal translations.

The new generation like Google Translate are statistical systems. Semantic ambiguities actually are fairly easy to resolve using statistics. The basic idea is this: Google can use the entire Internet to check if "Knives were ethical" or "Knives were efficient" is a more common thing to say. Also Google tries to translate the largest possible phrase, so if there is already a translation of "Knives were good" in their corpus then the problem will never occur.

Of cause there will always cases where this fails, but you'd be surprised how well it works. At least that is not the main concern at the moment. Maybe ultimately you could have a UI where a human selects the best translation. The actual problem with these systems is that they don't even have an understanding of syntax. With Google translate often entire parts of a sentence get lost.

andreasvc• 14 years ago

The current machine translation systems work with parallel texts, and they will for the foreseeable future. However, to properly translate you need to understand the meaning of a text, not just look up words or phrases in a table as is currently done (and using statistics does not address this). In other words, you need to have a connection between language and world, which is something only an intelligent agent has, hence the problem is AI complete. In terms of the nuances that were cited, it's not so much that they are infinite which is the problem, as other potentially infinite combinatorial systems such as syntax can be analysed effectively by computers. Rather it is the fact that choosing the right nuance depends on a completely arbitrary amount of context, such as the whole history of Russia when you're translating a Russian novel. So the problem is not impossible, but considering that even humans need years and years of study to do a good job at translation, I'd say machine translation that replaces humans is quite infeasible.

zipdog• 14 years ago

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.

planetguy2• 14 years ago

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.

floomp7• 14 years ago

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.

drostie4• 14 years ago

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

gambler• 14 years ago

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.

marquis2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

"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• 14 years ago

Never say never.

http://www.npr.org/2011/12/14/143639670/the-technology-helpi...

antidoh3• 14 years ago

"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.

A 1956 encyclopaedia's view on the computer

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