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- Please redirect this feedMay 21 2008
- Trent Reznor Prize, RNR DivsionApril 5 2008
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April 05, 2008
Trent Reznor Prize, RNR division
The Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding (Right-Node Raising division) goes to Andrew Ilachinsky, author of "Exploring self-organized emergence in an agent-based synthetic warfare lab", Kybernetes, 32(1/2): 38-76, 2003:
4.84 Universal grammar of combat. Finally, what lies at the heart of an artificial-life approach to simulating combat, is the hope of discovering a fundamental relationship between the set of higher-level emergent processes (penetration, flanking maneuvers, containment, etc.) and the set of low-level primitive actions (movement, communication, firing at an enemy, etc.).
Wolfram (1994) has conjectured that the macro-level emergent behavior of all cellular automata rules falls into one of only four universality classes, despite the huge number of possible local rules. While EINSTein's rules are obviously more complicated than those of their elementary cellular automata breth
- Mailbag: comparative communication efficiencyApril 5 2008
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April 05, 2008
Mailbag: comparative communication efficiency
In yesterday's post on "Comparing communication efficiency across languages", I compared the sizes of the English and Chinese sides of parallel (i.e. translated) text corpora, and observed that English seems to require 20-40% more bits to express the same information, even after the application of compression techniques that ought to eliminate most of the superficial and local reasons for such a difference. Bob Moore sent an interesting comment:
I can think of at least couple of reasons that might explain how there can appear to be a difference between the communication efficiency of two languages. One suggests that it might only be apparent; the other explains why it might be real.
Bob's first suggestion, about how to explain the difference away:
First, I would not trust gzip to yield an accurate measure of the information content of a given text. You probably recall that Peter B
- Yet another "yeah no" noteApril 4 2008
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April 04, 2008
Yet another "yeah no" note
Following up on "Yeah no" and "'Yeah no' mailbag" (4/3/2008), Russell Lee-Goldman writes:
I was actually about to send a long email to you about yeah-no, but decided just to put it on my blog.
That's "Yeah-no and no-yeah again", Noncompositional (3/4/2008).
But one highlight that might interest you is that I found a token of "yeah no" while trolling through archived NPR transcripts on lexis-nexis: it's Geoff Nunberg in Talk of the Nation, April 2nd 2004. The lead-up to the "yeah no" starts at around 10m:30s into his segment of the show.
See Russell's blog post for a transcript and discussion. If I were breaking into the conversation at this point, I might observe that
Yeah, no, well, in fact "yeah no" is pretty much
- Textbook ambiguitiesApril 4 2008
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April 04, 2008
Textbook ambiguities
Many -- indeed, most -- linguistic expressions have more than one meaning. An apparently trivial observation, but one that leads to all sorts of puzzles in linguistic analysis and theorizing. The central question is how meanings are associated with linguistic forms, and the answer cannot be that speakers have just memorized all these linkages (though they can have memorized some of them). Instead, we need to look for some kind of compositional account, in which meanings of smaller expressions and meanings associated with syntactic constructions work together to predict meanings of larger expressions. One crucial thing such an account has to manage is predicting, both accurately and completely, the range of ambiguities in complex expressions.
There's a huge literature on the subject, including textbook discussions of various ways in which ambiguities can arise. As it happens, my recent mail has brought me in-the-wild examples of ambiguous sentences of just the sort in textbooks.
From a NYT Magazine piece "Students of Virginity" by Randall Patterson (3/30/08, p. 41):