18 Mar Monkeys with Typewriters at the Threshold
Monkeys and Machines What’s wrong with the random Hamlet? When is the last time you’ve seen monkeys with typewriters? First of all, we must ask if there is anything that is perfectly random. If there is, and it is not influenced by any physical law, then the asymptotic theory of random probability is valid, and […]
15 Mar The Random Hamlet
For building an automated language understanding and translation system, I believe that adding random factors to the model for “fuzzy” reasoning is needed and important. The questions are: How do we use random factors to improve the outcomes of the process? Where do we insert random factors into the model? How do we implement random […]
14 Mar That’s so Random!
Random Probability Theory Some things are difficult to predict, and some are nearly impossible to predict. The further a thing gets from predictable, the more nearly it approaches randomness. It may seem silly to try to define chaos or randomness or anything that spends its entire existence trying to defy definition, but some of us […]
13 Mar Probability and Expectations
The sun is pretty likely to rise tomorrow – you can have confidence in that, but it is sometimes said that “there is no guarantee.” Scheduling meetings tomorrow based on the sunrise assumption is a safe bet, but there may be any number of other things that interfere with the meeting. Life is filled with […]
12 Mar Building a Concept Hierarchy
Existential knowledge, our knowledge of things that exist, is hierarchical. In other words, we categorize things into classes. Objects in these classes form the content of our thoughts. We have heard about the phylogenetic tree, the “tree of life” or the system of biological classification. This is a beautiful example of a regular taxonomy (irregular might have […]
11 Mar Joe’s Theory of Everything
While my teachers explained that language is about nouns and verbs, I think language is about symbolically representing everything and communicating about anything to anyone. There are many ways to look at the milieu in which we live from the tiniest sub-atomic particle on up. One way is to look at the larger context of […]
10 Mar The Context of Knowledge
What Is Knowledge? Just like the beautifully structured organization of all things in the physical universe, there is a hierarchy or taxonomy of knowledge. The levels and organization of the hierarchy, as I see them, are shown in the illustration below. Being fascinated by the concept of context, I have decided that, in this model, “context” includes […]
08 Mar In the Middle of a Big Wide World
The guy on the previous post (Your Personal Bubble) represents your typical office worker who sees himself as part of a universal hierarchy or taxonomy, though not exactly where he’d rather be in the big wide world. Each moment, we each learn from our own vantage point. While we can learn about all physical things, from […]
06 Mar Inference in the Face of Uncertainty
Do you know what I’m about to say? If your mind were not able to race ahead of the words and build a set of expectations about what comes next, you may not be able to understand me speaking or writing. But you can predict a lot more than your conscious awareness tells you. A […]
05 Mar Decide on Fuzzy Logic
In this section of Understanding Context, we describe not just how people think, but how they use their thoughts to guide their actions. We are particularly concerned with how people integrate multiple ideas or constraints into their thinking and decision-making processes, then put those decisions into action. It is sometimes said that the difference between information […]