New language helps quantum coders build killer apps - physics-math - 05 July 2013 - New Scientist

New language helps quantum coders build killer apps: Quipper is based on a classical programming language called Haskell, which is particularly suited to programming for physics applications. What Selinger's team has done is to customise it to deal with qubits.

They have also produced a library of Quipper code to carry out seven existing quantum algorithms, including an algorithm for estimating the ground-state energy of molecules...

The team made their estimates based on various existing forms of quantum hardware, including devices that use ion traps and photons.  However, they did not include the only quantum computer in the market today, the D-wave computer. It uses a novel approach called adiabatic quantum computing and so is not currently compatible with Quipper.

“Simplified” brain lets the iCub robot learn language

“Simplified” brain lets the iCub robot learn language: Thanks to so-called recurrent construction (with connections that create locally recurring loops) this artificial brain system can understand new sentences having a new grammatical structure. It is capable of linking two sentences and can even predict the end of a sentence before it is provided.

To put this advance into a real-life situation, the Inserm researchers incorporated this new brain into the iCub humanoid robot.

Humanoid Robot Learns Language Like a Baby | Wired Science | Wired.com

Humanoid Robot Learns Language Like a Baby | Wired Science | Wired.com: “Learning needs interaction with a human, and robot embodiment evokes appropriate reactions in a human teacher, which disembodied software does not,” said Lyon.

Using DeeChee also allowed the researchers to quantify the transition from babble to recognizable word forms in detail, drawing statistical links between sound frequencies and the robot’s performance that might eventually inform research on human learning.

RoboBee speaks honeybee dance language - tech - 19 August 2011 - New Scientist

RoboBee speaks honeybee dance language: In a field outside Berlin, Landgraf trained groups of honeybees to use a feeder, which he then closed. The bees stopped foraging and stayed in their hives. There they met RoboBee, which had been programmed with Landgraf's best guess at a waggle dance pointing to another feeder, which the bees had never visited.

The bees responded by leaving the hive, but returned to their old feeders. For now, it looks like RoboBee persuaded them to forage, but failed to communicate where to go. The team is confident RoboBee didn't just scare away the foragers, as honeybees respond to intruders by stinging, not fleeing.

Lingodroid Robots Invent Their Own Spoken Language - IEEE Spectrum

Lingodroid Robots Invent Their Own Spoken Language - IEEE Spectrum: Now Australian researchers are teaching a pair of robots to communicate linguistically like humans by inventing new spoken words, a lexicon that the roboticists can teach to other robots to generate an entirely new language...
If one of the robots finds itself in an unfamiliar area, it'll make up a word to describe it, choosing a random combination from a set of syllables. It then communicates that word to other robots that it meets, thereby defining the name of a place.

Computer Scientists Induce Schizophrenia in a Neural Network, Causing it to Make Ridiculous Claims | Popular Science

Computer Scientists Induce Schizophrenia in a Neural Network, Causing it to Make Ridiculous Claims | Popular Science: Telling the computer to “forget less” was akin to flooding the system with dopamine, confounding its ability to discern relationships between words, sentences and events, according to a news release from UT.

“DISCERN began putting itself at the center of fantastical, delusional stories that incorporated elements from other stories it had been told to recall,” according to the news release. In one answer, it claimed responsibility for a terrorist bombing.

Quantum links let computers understand language - physics-math - 08 December 2010 - New Scientist

Quantum links let computers understand language: Coecke's approach, aired at a recent workshop in Oxford, is based on category theory, a branch of mathematics that allows different objects within a collection, or category, to be linked. This makes it easy to express a problem in one area of mathematics as a problem in another, but for many years was viewed even by its creators as "general abstract nonsense"...
To create a vector for a sentence, Coecke has devised an algorithm to connect individual words, using the graphical links that were developed to model the flow of quantum information. In this case, the links embody basic grammatical rules, such as the way the word "likes" can be linked to "John" or "Mary", and the different way it can be linked to the word "not"...

What if we used poetry to teach computers to speak better?

What if we used poetry to teach computers to speak better?: "'Voice synthesis has become quite impressive in terms of the pronunciation of individual words,' Wagner explained. 'But when a computer 'speaks,' whole sentences still sound artificial because of the complicated way we put emphasis on parts of them, depending on context and what we want to get across.'"

Stephen Wolfram Blog : The Free-Form Linguistics Revolution in Mathematica

Stephen Wolfram Blog : The Free-Form Linguistics Revolution in Mathematica: You don’t have to use precise Mathematica syntax. You can type things in just the way you think about them, in free-form English. But what happens is that Mathematica calls on Wolfram|Alpha to try to interpret your input, and turn it into precise Mathematica code.

[1011.0330] Imitation learning of motor primitives and language bootstrapping in robots

[1011.0330] Imitation learning of motor primitives and language bootstrapping in robots: "Imitation learning in robots, also called programing by demonstration, has made important advances in recent years, allowing humans to teach context dependant motor skills/tasks to robots. We propose to extend the usual contexts investigated to also include acoustic linguistic expressions that might denote a given motor skill, and thus we target joint learning of the motor skills and their potential acoustic linguistic name."

The brain speaks | Science Blog

The brain speaks | Science Blog: "The University of Utah research team placed grids of tiny microelectrodes over speech centers in the brain of a volunteer with severe epileptic seizures. The man already had a craniotomy — temporary partial skull removal — so doctors could place larger, conventional electrodes to locate the source of his seizures and surgically stop them.

Using the experimental microelectrodes, the scientists recorded brain signals as the patient repeatedly read each of 10 words that might be useful to a paralyzed person: yes, no, hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, hello, goodbye, more and less.

Later, they tried figuring out which brain signals represented each of the 10 words. When they compared any two brain signals — such as those generated when the man said the words “yes” and “no” — they were able to distinguish brain signals for each word 76 percent to 90 percent of the time."

Is there a language problem with quantum physics? - physics-math - 05 January 2008 - New Scientist

Is there a language problem with quantum physics? - physics-math - 05 January 2008 - New Scientist: "Bohm pointed out that quantum effects are much more process-based, so to describe them accurately requires a process-based language rich in verbs, and in which nouns play only a secondary role. In the last year of his life, Bohm and some like-minded physicists, including myself, met a number of native American elders of the Blackfoot, Micmac and Ojibwa tribes - all speakers of the Algonquian family of languages. These languages have a wide variety of verb forms, while they lack the notion of dividing the world into categories of objects, such as "fish", "trees" or "birds".

Take, for example, the phrase in the Montagnais language, Hipiskapigoka iagusit. In a 1729 dictionary, this was translated as "the magician/sorceror sings a sick man". According to Alan Ford, an expert in the Algonquian languages at the University of Montreal, Canada, this deeply distorts the nature of the thinking processes of the Montagnais people, for the translator had tried to transform a verb-based concept into a European language dominated by nouns and object categories. Rather than there being a medicine person who is doing something to a sick patient, there is an activity of singing, a process. In this world view, songs are alive, singing is going on, and within the process is a medicine person and a sick man.

The world view of Algonquian speakers is of flux and change, of objects emerging and folding back into the flux of the world. There is not the same sense of fixed identity - even a person's name will change during their life. They believe that objects will vanish into this flux unless renewed by periodic rituals or the pipe smoked at sunrise in the sun dance ceremony of the Lakota and Blackfoot."