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Where is your head?
Creating a robot that can converse intelligibly is an idea that science fiction has had a lot of fun with. But writing software that can reliably interpret the English language, and model the processes of human reasoning, is challenging to say the least. A funny human-computer dialog came to mind today... bare with me on this one.
Person: "Hi, my name is George" Computer: "Hello George" Person: "George, I have a question for you" Computer: "What is your question?" Person: "How tall am I?"
Upon receiving the question, the computer launches into an internal debate about how to answer. Let's listen in on this thoughts:
"Ok, he's asking 'how tall'. That's another way of asking me his height" "Height is a distance" "Distance is a relationship between two locations" "Ok, to calculate the person's height, I'll need to calculate the distance between two locations: The location of his head and the location of his feet"
After thinking for a moment longer, the computer responds:
"Where is your head?"
:) |
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