Can someone attempt to ELI5/provide more context for why "always choose the right" eluded scholars for so long?
Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
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Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
#32An Indian PhD student at Cambridge University, who was studying Sanskrit under his Italian (Naples born) professor of Sanskrit...has cracked a 2500yr linguistic Sanskrit algorithm to generate sentences.
I would call this the GPT-3 moment for Sanskrit. ;)
Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
#33> 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…
Is there a specific term for this subconscious phenomenon? I believe I have experienced this multiple times, but I remember one event in particular when I couldn't solve a book exercise for several hours, I slept in frustration. When I woke up I knew the answer immediately as if it was obvious.
“Sleeping on it” probably gives the brain time for “spreading activation“, which is a model that describes how relationships between concepts are explored and formed.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13421-012-0256-7
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/spread...
Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
#34> "If the solution is complicated, you are probably wrong." True in so many situations, Vincenzo.
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Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
#35As I understand it, this rule allows one to have an unambiguous parse of a sanskrit sentence into its constituent parts (it feels a bit like "the longest prefix match" rule used in packet forwarding!). My question is, did Pāṇini not specify this rule in his 3959 sūtras or was it somehow missed?
[Edit: covered in Rajpopat's thesis...]
Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
#36> "If the solution is complicated, you are probably wrong." True in so many situations, Vincenzo.
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The statements "If it's complicated, it's probably wrong." and "Sometimes, problems have a complicated solution." are compatible with each other. In fact they're saying the same thing.
Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
#37As an Indian, Rajpopat’s this comment struck a chord -
> Some of the most ancient wisdom of India has been produced in Sanskrit and we still don't fully understand what our ancestors achieved. We've often been led to believe that we're not important, that we haven't brought enough to the table. I hope this discovery will infuse students in India with confidence, pride, and hope that they too can achieve great things.
I can definitely attest to wondering why a country so old hasn’t added much to human scientific advancement. Maybe the knowledge is locked away behind hard to penetrate language.
Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
#38[deleted]
Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
#39> 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…
Is there a specific term for this subconscious phenomenon? I believe I have experienced this multiple times, but I remember one event in particular when I couldn't solve a book exercise for several hours, I slept in frustration. When I woke up I knew the answer immediately as if it was obvious.
> I slept in frustration
Human brain runs a defrag process (quite literally) when the body sleeps. Not only this removes the cruft from the day but also rearranges and makes links for the knowledge gathered through the day.
Re: Ancient grammatical puzzle solved after 2,500 years
#40Can someone attempt to ELI5/provide more context for why "always choose the right" eluded scholars for so long?
My guess is he said "always choose the latter" so they thought he meant the latter rule to apply rather than the latter morpheme to apply a rule.