Hi guys,

This is very interesting discussion for me. And educating too. I have no professional knowledge in Computer sciences nor in Mathematics nor in Linguistics. I am just an ordinary man who struggles with learning of English. If you allow me to speak I will say(just my unprofessional opinion):

I don't know what Language is(natural/programming language). But I want to know what Simple sentence is(as a unit of Language).

The root of the problem(as I see it) are poor definitions of:

• simple sentence;

• preposition;

• conjunction;

• grammatical case;

• "Definition is ... ." and so on.

Also I find term AI somehow confusing for me. Isn't the goal building of a Conscious machine and not a machine with Artificial Consciousness?

Here is a thought: there isn't Language (by itself/per se).

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong. /H. L. Mencken/

I believe that for every right question there is an answer that is clear, simple and right. /if you can't find the right answer, you have probably been asking the wrong question/

So, if there isn't Language( by itself), what is Simple sentence then? If we can't find answer of what is Consciousness, we have probably been using wrong definitions and wrong set of initial/basic terms.

Thank you and have a nice day.

I'm unsure if Apple Siri (or MS Cortana) is enabled in mm to do anything beyond allow use as typing or simple commands (ie, if integrate is in it's vocab of having loaded special actions).

All language becomes binary, and conversion time is an issue. Coders don't like being "too distant" from machine level programming because there is the real possibility that algorithms made never finish (big O). Simplicity is good in limited situations - mathematica's power goes far beyond the simple side of things.

unix SH (bash) if i remember was developed by nasa engineers to be a human readable script because previous language used had more than once caused "an issue" due to legibility. mm has better legibility than sh, of course :)

you can say "let's add a bot" that understands i'm doing a specific school book problem. that's allot of bots - and could end up being gigabytes of extra install

you can say "let's add some chemistry formula and computation" or "celestial sciences" and they did: it's kept out of the normal distribution (it pulls the package upon request) because it's just too big. and some of the data owners also don't agree to give users rights to "just download and keep" it all.

a better question is how, with terrabyte drives, we are still in a position of "trying to stay thin" ?

Wolfram Language programmers are using human language level programming?

[quote="Morton Goldberg, Retired"] Please provide a reference to the quotation that appears in your question. I would to know the author, where it was published/expressed and its date. [/quote]

@Morton Goldberg,

The following link is the reference to the quotation that appears in my question: https://forum.osdev.org/viewtopic.php?p=286902#p286902

[quote="George Woodrow III, Freelance Mathematician"] I think that people who make statements like this significantly underestimate the complexity and ambiguity of natural language. [/quote]

@George Woodrow III, An intelligent compiler will ask for clarification whenever there’s an ambiguity and may suggest improved wordings to resolve the issue. Writing a program will end up being a conversation with an intelligent machine which anyone could handle even if they know nothing about programming - it will be a collaboration with an intelligent system which is in itself an expert programmer. The error messages will be comments and questions just like the ones you’d get if you were co-writing a program with a human programmer. (“When you say “print the result of that part”, do you mean this part [a section of the code is highlighted], and do you want it printed to the screen or the printer?”)

None of that will stop you putting in a line of C or any other programming language if you want to, but most of the work will simply be done in natural language, typically at a much higher level with the compiler working out how to carry out the tasks asked of it. The end user will also become a programmer, telling the machine how (s)he would prefer things to be done, and the machine will comply. That will rarely be done through anything other than natural language.

Where natural language is ambiguous, the machine can simply ask for clarification to make sure it has understood the instruction the right way, and if it hasn’t, it can help the programmer improve the wording of the instruction.

It is a constant source of frustration that W|A does not return what I expect in may cases. I have had many discussions about this issue with tech support since the service was implemented.

In addition, The W|A "universe" is a small subset of common discourse. You get far too many "I am not programmed to respond in that area" - type answers to too many queries, even what may be considered to be technical inquiries.

W|A does a fairly good job at providing the type of information that was in the old CRC handbooks or a decent almanac. You need patience to phrase the query in the form that W|A's parsers can handle.

However, this is by no means close to the type of natural language discourse.

I will know that there has been progress when you can ask W|A (probably its descendant) about the meaning of a phrase from Finnegan's Wake, and have it provide a meaningful answer on the fly (that is, not a canned response from a human authority).

For now, I am satisfied that it is a decent interface to the CRC tables and Information Please, and this is a major accomplishment. However, it does not cover the full range of natural language.