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Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

phys.org

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Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#11

Post by satvikpendem »

addaon wrote: post #9
Konohamaru wrote: post #6

Pāṇini was probably the only man I would say was comparable to Einstein in intelligence.

I can't imagine by what path you make that assessment, but... Any discussion of outliers in intelligence that mentions Einstein but not Newton is simply missing a difference of several standard deviations.

Physics wasn't even Newton's main work, he did it on the side while his true passion was in alchemy. He just so happened discover color and light theory along the way, while also writing philosophical letters to Locke and Leibniz.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#12

Post by kweingar »

raydiatian wrote: post #8

1. Why is this on phys.org 2. Why is the writing so dramatic

This was written by Cambridge and published on their website. It was republished by phys.org which aggregates science, research, and tech news.

It might be better if the link was changed to the original article on Cambridge’s website: https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/solving-grammars-greatest-puzz...

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#13

Post by addaon »

satvikpendem wrote: post #11
addaon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine by what path you make that assessment, but... Any discussion of outliers in intelligence that mentions Einstein but not Newton is simply missing a difference of several standard deviations.

Physics wasn't even Newton's main work, he did it on the side while his true passion was in alchemy. He just so happened discover color and light theory along the way, while also writing philosophical letters to Locke and Leibniz.

Yeah.

It is not obvious to me that, across the total number of human minds produced so far, an outlier like Newton has any reasonable probability of existing.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#15

Post by satvikpendem »

addaon wrote: post #13
satvikpendem wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physics wasn't even Newton's main work, he did it on the side while his true passion was in alchemy. He just so happened discover color and light theory along the way, while also writing philosophical letters to Locke and Leibniz.

Yeah. It is not obvious to me that, across the total number of human minds produced so far, an outlier like Newton has any reasonable probability of existing.

Well there are a lot of polymaths though, Newton really is not that special. von Neumann, Feynman, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs etc come to mind.

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#17

Post by anshumankmr »

>Rajpopat said, "Computer scientists working on natural language processing gave up on rule-based approaches over 50 years ago... So teaching computers how to combine the speaker's intention with Pāṇini's rule-based grammar to produce human speech would be a major milestone in the history of human interaction with machines, as well as in India's intellectual history."

So... a 2500 year algorithm would be running on a modern machine. Very cool indeed. What I am not sure they meant by teaching it to produce human speech. Is it like an automata diagram that defines the rules for Sanskrit language?

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#18

Post by slivanes »

satvikpendem wrote: post #15
addaon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. It is not obvious to me that, across the total number of human minds produced so far, an outlier like Newton has any reasonable probability of existing.

Well there are a lot of polymaths though, Newton really is not that special. von Neumann, Feynman, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs etc come to mind.

Jobs does not deserve any mention among those other people. Jobs was a leader (tyrant by many accounts) and didn’t advance or discover anything?

Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years

#20

Post by walty8 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #10

> Six months before Rajpopat made his discovery, his supervisor at Cambridge, Vincenzo Vergiani, Professor of Sanskrit, gave him some prescient advice: "If the solution is complicated, you are probably wrong." > Rajpopat said, "I had a eureka moment in Cambridge. After 9 months trying to crack this problem, I was almost ready to quit, I was getting nowhere. So I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summe…

In general, for complicated items, I prefer to code at one place and think at another place. They seems to require different parts of your brain, and have different 'comfortable spots'.
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