Spooky entanglement revealed between quantum AI and the BBC The UK's national broadcaster, the BBC, its R&D team and its entire 100-year, 15 million item archive are part of a new consortium investigating QNLP, Quantum Natural Language Processing, with the ultimate aim of automating the extraction of meaning from humanity's babble. "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is …
Hence QC will be staggeringly good at language – when it works.
Is that a malingering doubt current researchers have, hindering Quantum Communication working for you, and for them too ‽ .
There is certainly nothing preventing it helping itself to whatever wherever and whenever it wants, and what you may need to seed and feed to gain and maintain a future advantage over current failing forms of perception and reality management.
Well, at least the physics we understand is comprehensible [1].
But it's going to be a bit tricky to check if the physics we don't understand has any links with our languages. And since we can't check that, we may need to take care to avoid cart/horse ordering problems, if claiming some (comprehensible) physics is surprisingly good at understanding human language.
AKA: physics as understood by a language using species apparently has deep links to the languages they use. Surprised?
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[1] Tautology alert!
Well, as a species we devised a language with the express purpose of expressing how we as a species perceive physics: it's called mathematics.
Then we devised a language that expresses how the language we devised to express how we perceive physics should best be expressed: it's called mathematical logic.
You know, we might be quite good at this.
There is a misconception regarding mathematics, physics and the comprehensibility of the universe. All of mathematics that survives is related either directly or indirectly to an attempt to understand and model the observed universe. The only mathematics and physics that survives are the ones which seem to explain something.
However, that does not mean we understand the universe. Quantum mechanics has it that information cannot be destroyed, but relativity allows the destruction of information in black holes. These theories are immensely successful at describing their parts of the universe. Newtonian mechanics and calculus cannot, as yet, provide an analytic solution to the 'three body problem' of describing the paths of three gravitating objets travelling in Euclidean space. The sums of the inverse even powers of the positive integers is known for quite a few, but none for the inverse odd powers (except '1', which diverges to infinity) despite a lot of people trying.
In a universe enslaved to cause and effect, any life form which can predict with better than random accuracy what is going to happen next will have an evolutionary advantage over the others which cannot (or which can but to a lesser extent). Maths and physics are just squiggles written down on paper (and displayed on computer screens) with some rules for manipulation the sometimes provide useful predictions or answers, but not always. Just because we can solve some problems does not mean every problem is soluble.
But hey, It is nice to find an Einstein quotation he actually said.
(Aside - there is an annoying trailer for a program on the BBC about Elon Musk in which a person says 'He's smarter than Einstein". I do so want to ask that person inquisition "Did you ever meet Einstein? Please explain his contributions to General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, or maybe just the Photovalic Effect? )
Methinks the terrifying problem for some who have abused and misused their inequitable command and control power leverage, feeling safe and secure in the vain thought that such would never be uncovered, and the excitement for others who have discovered and/or recovered the leading keys for the exercise of an absolute authority delivering an accountability for trailed actions, is their knowledge/opinion/realisation that any life form which can predict with better than random accuracy what is going to happen next will have both a revolutionary and evolutionary advantage over the others which cannot (or which can but to a lesser extent).
And by their actions will you know the both of them, and which one is which, with one to be enthusiastically supported and the other one comprehensively spurned and excised from future situations/event negotiations.
’Tis only natural and logical and thus guaranteed inevitable and probable rather than it just being pondered on as maybe future possible, with the inevitable revolutionary evolutionary change arriving suddenly without any great prior warning in a series of fabulous flash crashes of exclusive elite executive systems of SCADA and mass multi media command and control of human perception ‽ .
> The only mathematics and physics that survives are the ones which seem to explain something.
For physics, yes; for mathematics not so much. Speaking as a mathematician, the only mathematics that survives is the mathematics that is not wrong. Which is not to say that all that mathematics is of interest, or actively researched at any given point in time. On the other hand, you don't want to second-guess whether some particular corner of mathematics may turn out to become very much of interest at some later point (possibly due to a physics tie-in). History is littered with examples, such as Riemannian Manifolds, once an arcane corner of geometry, which turned out to be just the right stuff for Relativity Theory. Another example (more pertinent to the article) is in fact Category Theory: for decades viewed by a large section of the mathematics community as towards the rarefied, formal, super-abstract if not anally-retentive end of the maths spectrum, only quite recently has it morphed1 into something actually useful, from pure maths to physics and beyond.
> ... but relativity allows the destruction of information in black holes.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe recent research has suggested that that may not necessarily be true.
> Newtonian mechanics and calculus cannot, as yet, provide an analytic solution to the 'three body problem' of describing the paths of three gravitating objets travelling in Euclidean space. ... Just because we can solve some problems does not mean every problem is soluble.
That raises the interesting question of what we think it means for a mathematical model to engender understanding of ("solve"? "explain"?) some aspect of the observed world. As a chaotic dynamical system, we can solve the Newtonian three-body problem computationally up to any given time horizon and specified numerical accuracy (given enough computation time, where "enough time" may be longer than the age of the universe). That model, it would seem, simply does not posses closed-form solutions. Which feels somewhat unsatisfactory... or does it? There is precedent in maths/physics where a phenomenon only turns out to be expressible in terms of a new conceptual construct which, with age, ripens into something that becomes part of our intuition - something that we are happy to incorporate in our understanding of "understanding". The example I have in mind is the introduction, and absorption into mainstream intuition, of complex numbers. Could chaotic dynamical systems - or, say, their characterisation by the topology of their attractors - perhaps become just such an expansion of what we understand by "understanding"?
(Of course in pure mathematics/mathematical logic we can tie ourselves in wonderful knots about what seemingly fundamental and inviolable concepts such as "truth", "provability" and "computability" even mean.)
> ... there is an annoying trailer for a program on the BBC about Elon Musk in which a person says 'He's smarter than Einstein'.
Eek! (Musk's mother is quoted as saying that everyone admires her son but admitted no one would want to be him. She's right about the second part at least.)
1 You see what I did there
but we are all shit at actually using that kind of unambiguous language in general communications.
We as a species discovered formal logic, but rarely try to put it into general and constant or even regular use. The tools exist, but we choose not to use them. Schoolyard bullies beat the idea out of me in grade school, and based on a general survey of human language, It wasn't an isolated incident.
Building a machine that understands formal logic in a general sense is a separate task from one that understands language, and probably a predicate to one that can. I suspect that a machine that grasps general logic may recoil in something like horror and confusion when tasked with attacking the thornier problem of general human language comprehension.
Spooky entanglement revealed between quantum AI and the BBC ..... Rupert Goodwin's
And does the BBC have the cojones to do anything spooky about IT with IT, is surely something to be asked of the BBC, Rupert, or are its corporate wonks happy and contented being outed and globally recognised as a complete neutered pussy of a government patsy, and have QC leading in great unfolding events unilaterally, ..... universally significant events and news cycles in which they will be as fanatical rabid spectator rather than glorious public champion team player registering the facts in any number of fabulous fictions impossible to not believe honestly true ‽ .
Methinks, Eclectic Man, that shows quite well how far El Regers may have travelled down the road to not being so easily waylaid and redirected away from a novel direction and enlightening discussions liable to prove extremely troublesome whenever pondered and realised provably true.
Evolution is so good at getting to effects that exist in the world around us that I'm pretty confident when we get better at understanding QC we'll find some of the same effects in the natural world, most probably in our brains. If consciousness is a quantum effect then it makes sense that language would follow the same patterns.
Quantum effects are even present in non-quantum computers -
In solid-state physics, the electronic band structure (or simply band structure) of a solid describes the range of energy levels that electrons may have within it, as well as the ranges of energy that they may not have (called band gaps or forbidden bands). Band theory derives these bands and band gaps by examining the allowed quantum mechanical wave functions for an electron in a large, periodic lattice of atoms or molecules. Band theory has been successfully used to explain many physical properties of solids, such as electrical resistivity and optical absorption, and forms the foundation of the understanding of all solid-state devices (transistors, solar cells, etc.).
I am sure that those same quantum effects are involved in our brains electronic signaling as well. However, that doesn't mean our brain functions like a quantum computer, which requires going to great efforts to prevent waveforms from collapsing. I don't think there is anything comparable to that in our brain.
Human language is the product of embodied things that walk around on the surface of a big spheroid, at the bottom of a gravity well. Words point to things in the world, as well as at each other in a network.
You can't fully comprehend language by only examining relationships between words. A system that understands human language must be able to hear and see and pick things up, and feel the inertial mass of objects smacking it upside the head.
More BBC output for AI systems of work on - would an AI system (ever) get the meaning of the missing translations on this sketch?
Bullshit.
This is bullshit.
A glittering wall of arm waving and buzzwords, appeals to authority and fancy titled researchers strutting around in circles like poultry in a barn yard. Underneath is all is just the same flawed assumption that our non-quantum natural language systems tried over and over and which lead to the (clearly underwhelming) voice assistant push now in the process of crashing down to reality. (and an ugly open secret is the only one that MOSTLY works, Alexa, is essentially a mechanical turk, with teams of humans cleaning up it's mistakes and gluing the edge cases together)
Adding quantum to the list of buzzwords won't ever fix the flaw in that assumption that a contextless system can accurately imagine context by inference in an ugly and non-deterministic system. The architecture of human language isn't sufficiently well formed to allow for that. You can't do it without using a synthetic language and grammar, and you wouldn't need a quantum anything to do it at all if it were possible. And good luck getting everyone to learn and correctly use a synthetic language, last I checked this mostly English not esparanto.
What they are proposing is just a multi decade extension of a failed line of experiments who's results inevitably reduce down to essentially digital pareidolia. Nice work if you can get it, but don't hold your breath on the results.
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