WEBVTT 00:00:15.220 --> 00:00:19.340 PATRICK WINSTON: We might wonder a little bit about the 00:00:19.340 --> 00:00:24.540 nature of human intelligence, and we might reflect a little 00:00:24.540 --> 00:00:26.230 bit on the kind of intelligence we've been 00:00:26.230 --> 00:00:28.310 talking about in the past few weeks. 00:00:28.310 --> 00:00:31.160 It's been an intelligence of sorts. 00:00:31.160 --> 00:00:33.980 Those programs, support vector machines, boosting, they can 00:00:33.980 --> 00:00:36.030 do really smart things. 00:00:36.030 --> 00:00:38.710 But the peculiar thing about systems that use those methods 00:00:38.710 --> 00:00:43.770 is that those systems don't have any idea about what 00:00:43.770 --> 00:00:45.260 they're doing. 00:00:45.260 --> 00:00:47.380 They don't know anything. 00:00:47.380 --> 00:00:49.810 So they don't give us very much of an insight into the 00:00:49.810 --> 00:00:52.720 nature of human intelligence. 00:00:52.720 --> 00:00:54.500 And, after all, I'd like to have a model of human 00:00:54.500 --> 00:00:58.000 intelligence because, let's face it, we're the smartest 00:00:58.000 --> 00:00:59.830 things around. 00:00:59.830 --> 00:01:02.760 So there are lots of ways to approach that question. 00:01:02.760 --> 00:01:08.090 And we'll approach that question first from a 00:01:08.090 --> 00:01:10.560 evolutionary point of view. 00:01:10.560 --> 00:01:16.990 Some scientists believe, me for instance, that we have a 00:01:16.990 --> 00:01:26.280 family tree that looks about like this. 00:01:30.110 --> 00:01:33.970 Too small to see much of that, but the main point is that we 00:01:33.970 --> 00:01:36.360 haven't been around very long. 00:01:36.360 --> 00:01:40.470 We humans have been around maybe 200,000 years, and the 00:01:40.470 --> 00:01:44.030 dinosaurs died out 60 million years ago. 00:01:44.030 --> 00:01:47.890 So in the blink of an eye, we seem to have, more or less, 00:01:47.890 --> 00:01:50.500 taken over. 00:01:50.500 --> 00:01:54.590 When you look at that family tree on a scale where you can 00:01:54.590 --> 00:01:57.960 see it, one of the characteristics is increasing 00:01:57.960 --> 00:01:59.210 brain size. 00:02:02.380 --> 00:02:06.980 There we are on the left, chimpanzee on the right. 00:02:06.980 --> 00:02:11.300 Clearly, mostly mouth, not to much brain in there. 00:02:11.300 --> 00:02:15.040 That one down below is a reconstruction of one of those 00:02:15.040 --> 00:02:20.380 pithecus type bipedal apes from about 4 million 00:02:20.380 --> 00:02:22.680 years ago or so. 00:02:22.680 --> 00:02:25.770 So we became bipedal a long time before we 00:02:25.770 --> 00:02:27.810 had much of a brain. 00:02:27.810 --> 00:02:30.980 So you might think, well, maybe brain size has a lot to 00:02:30.980 --> 00:02:34.079 do with it, and I suppose it does. 00:02:34.079 --> 00:02:40.700 So we can plot brain volume of our ancestors versus time. 00:02:40.700 --> 00:02:42.950 So the picture I just showed you was from about 3 million 00:02:42.950 --> 00:02:45.740 years ago, I guess. 00:02:45.740 --> 00:02:48.530 And then on the upper right hand corner, oh, that's not 00:02:48.530 --> 00:02:51.500 just us, that's also the Neanderthals. 00:02:51.500 --> 00:02:54.750 Their brains might have been slightly bigger than ours. 00:02:54.750 --> 00:02:58.020 So it isn't just brain size. 00:02:58.020 --> 00:03:00.660 Here's what that guy looks like. 00:03:00.660 --> 00:03:04.930 That's a Neanderthal, of course, on the left. 00:03:04.930 --> 00:03:06.680 And that's one of us on the right. 00:03:06.680 --> 00:03:12.630 Some conspicuous differences, big heads, the rib cage is 00:03:12.630 --> 00:03:17.130 kind of conical in shape, a large pelvis. 00:03:17.130 --> 00:03:19.670 People like to make a lot of speculations about how they 00:03:19.670 --> 00:03:22.031 must have moved around. 00:03:22.031 --> 00:03:26.062 But one thing is plain, they didn't amount to much. 00:03:26.062 --> 00:03:29.300 They could make stone tools, but those stone tools didn't 00:03:29.300 --> 00:03:33.170 change much over tens of thousands of years. 00:03:33.170 --> 00:03:36.240 And that was pretty much the story with us too, until 00:03:36.240 --> 00:03:40.400 something happened, probably in southern Africa, probably 00:03:40.400 --> 00:03:45.500 in a group of individuals, maybe less than 1,000. 00:03:45.500 --> 00:03:46.520 And what's the evidence for that? 00:03:46.520 --> 00:03:48.840 The evidence for that is mostly-- 00:03:48.840 --> 00:03:54.420 comes from DNA studies with a lot of probabilistic 00:03:54.420 --> 00:03:57.850 assumptions, and Monte Carlo simulations, but it seems 00:03:57.850 --> 00:04:00.640 among the competing hypothesis for how we came to populate 00:04:00.640 --> 00:04:03.290 the world, it seems that there was a group of us, homo 00:04:03.290 --> 00:04:06.820 sapiens, in Southern Africa that got something that nobody 00:04:06.820 --> 00:04:11.920 else had and the highest probability scenario is that 00:04:11.920 --> 00:04:14.870 we quickly took over. 00:04:14.870 --> 00:04:18.560 That population of homo sapiens dominated the rest, 00:04:18.560 --> 00:04:21.970 went out of Africa, and within the blink of an eye did that 00:04:21.970 --> 00:04:23.220 sort of stuff. 00:04:25.300 --> 00:04:28.330 What's that sort of stuff? 00:04:28.330 --> 00:04:31.120 Those two paintings are from Lascaux about 00:04:31.120 --> 00:04:35.190 25,000 years ago. 00:04:35.190 --> 00:04:37.870 Paleoanthropologists, like Tattersall, take that as plain 00:04:37.870 --> 00:04:40.190 evidence that there was symbolic thought on the people 00:04:40.190 --> 00:04:43.710 who were around at that time, us homo sapiens. 00:04:43.710 --> 00:04:49.120 The head is a carving of a mastodon tusk of a woman 00:04:49.120 --> 00:04:51.110 25,000 years ago. 00:04:51.110 --> 00:04:56.750 Also, plainly symbolic, people are making a lot of jewelry 00:04:56.750 --> 00:04:57.860 and doing self adornment. 00:04:57.860 --> 00:05:00.130 The Neanderthals never seemed to do that. 00:05:00.130 --> 00:05:03.180 That jewelry making seems to have gone back to Southern 00:05:03.180 --> 00:05:06.410 Africa, maybe 70,000 years ago. 00:05:06.410 --> 00:05:09.060 People were puncturing seashells and using them as 00:05:09.060 --> 00:05:11.990 necklaces, apparently. 00:05:11.990 --> 00:05:15.350 So something happened, and the paleoanthropologists, who 00:05:15.350 --> 00:05:18.110 write fascinating stuff, don't quite know how to talk about 00:05:18.110 --> 00:05:19.360 it other than to say it looks like we 00:05:19.360 --> 00:05:21.820 became somehow symbolic. 00:05:21.820 --> 00:05:25.780 And somehow that has something to do with language. 00:05:25.780 --> 00:05:30.280 So if you talk to Noam Chomsky he will say-- 00:05:30.280 --> 00:05:32.020 let me get this precise, this is near his 00:05:32.020 --> 00:05:34.450 quotation as I can get. 00:05:34.450 --> 00:05:37.920 He thinks it was the ability to take two concepts and put 00:05:37.920 --> 00:05:41.400 them together to form a third concept without disturbing the 00:05:41.400 --> 00:05:44.850 original concepts and without limit, and each 00:05:44.850 --> 00:05:47.030 part of that's important. 00:05:47.030 --> 00:05:50.100 The without limit part is what separates us from species that 00:05:50.100 --> 00:05:53.659 might be able to do that a little bit, but we can do it 00:05:53.659 --> 00:05:57.210 without any apparent limit. 00:05:57.210 --> 00:05:58.760 So that's a linguist speaking. 00:05:58.760 --> 00:06:00.910 He talks a lot about the merge operation, and 00:06:00.910 --> 00:06:03.080 combinators and language-- 00:06:03.080 --> 00:06:04.680 using terms foreign to us. 00:06:04.680 --> 00:06:06.550 Better not use the term "combinator," it's kind of a 00:06:06.550 --> 00:06:08.810 computer science term. 00:06:08.810 --> 00:06:13.210 But whatever it is, it seemed to happen about that time. 00:06:13.210 --> 00:06:16.980 It didn't happen slowly and proportion to brain size, it 00:06:16.980 --> 00:06:20.460 seemed to happen all of a sudden in consequence of a 00:06:20.460 --> 00:06:24.520 brain that had grown big enough to be an enablement but 00:06:24.520 --> 00:06:27.480 the capability was not what pulled 00:06:27.480 --> 00:06:29.710 evolution in that direction. 00:06:29.710 --> 00:06:35.000 So, I believe, that whatever that was, that capability, 00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:41.540 enabled humans, us humans, to tell and understand stories, 00:06:41.540 --> 00:06:45.150 and that's what separates us from the other primates. 00:06:45.150 --> 00:06:46.300 That ability to-- 00:06:46.300 --> 00:06:51.280 The symbolic ability, whatever it is, enabled storytelling 00:06:51.280 --> 00:06:52.070 and understanding. 00:06:52.070 --> 00:06:54.770 And that's what all education is about and that's why our 00:06:54.770 --> 00:06:56.880 species is special. 00:06:56.880 --> 00:07:01.830 So what we're going to talk about today is something you 00:07:01.830 --> 00:07:03.720 might think of as an instantiation of that 00:07:03.720 --> 00:07:06.740 hypothesis, one way of thinking about it. 00:07:06.740 --> 00:07:08.920 And it's a way of thinking about what the linguists would 00:07:08.920 --> 00:07:11.090 call the inner language. 00:07:11.090 --> 00:07:14.240 It's not the language with which we communicate, it's the 00:07:14.240 --> 00:07:18.660 language with which we think, which is closely related to 00:07:18.660 --> 00:07:21.840 the language with which we communicate, but may not be 00:07:21.840 --> 00:07:24.090 quite the same thing. 00:07:24.090 --> 00:07:26.900 So many of you are bilingual. 00:07:26.900 --> 00:07:28.200 Chris is bilingual. 00:07:28.200 --> 00:07:30.640 Chris, have you ever had the experience of remembering that 00:07:30.640 --> 00:07:33.860 someone said something to you, but not remembering what 00:07:33.860 --> 00:07:36.658 language they used? 00:07:36.658 --> 00:07:37.908 STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE]. 00:07:42.450 --> 00:07:43.250 PATRICK WINSTON: How about [? you, Sian, ?] have you had 00:07:43.250 --> 00:07:44.677 that experience? 00:07:44.677 --> 00:07:45.870 STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE]. 00:07:45.870 --> 00:07:46.420 PATRICK WINSTON: What? 00:07:46.420 --> 00:07:47.670 STUDENT: I always [INAUDIBLE]. 00:07:50.121 --> 00:07:52.490 PATRICK WINSTON: [INAUDIBLE] experience of having-- 00:07:52.490 --> 00:07:55.010 David, have you ever had that experience of remembering some 00:07:55.010 --> 00:07:57.140 conversation but not remembering the language in 00:07:57.140 --> 00:07:58.659 which it was cast? 00:07:58.659 --> 00:08:00.046 STUDENT: Well, you remember something you usually don't 00:08:00.046 --> 00:08:01.894 know which language it was in anyway. 00:08:01.894 --> 00:08:03.880 PATRICK WINSTON: You usually don't remember. 00:08:03.880 --> 00:08:05.480 That's a common view. 00:08:05.480 --> 00:08:07.110 You remember something was said, that there was a 00:08:07.110 --> 00:08:11.640 conversation that had some content, but if it's with a 00:08:11.640 --> 00:08:14.250 speaker of your own language and your embedded in another 00:08:14.250 --> 00:08:18.340 place, you often don't remember what language the 00:08:18.340 --> 00:08:20.110 conversation was in. 00:08:20.110 --> 00:08:22.500 Is that right, [? Wana, ?] you remember things like that? 00:08:22.500 --> 00:08:23.912 Not sure? 00:08:23.912 --> 00:08:25.941 STUDENT: People who [INAUDIBLE] speak in a certain 00:08:25.941 --> 00:08:27.520 language, so-- 00:08:27.520 --> 00:08:29.060 PATRICK WINSTON: Sometimes you don't have that confusion, she 00:08:29.060 --> 00:08:32.400 says, because you always speak to particular people in a 00:08:32.400 --> 00:08:33.330 particular language. 00:08:33.330 --> 00:08:36.169 But many people report that they have that experience of 00:08:36.169 --> 00:08:40.289 not remembering which language something was said in. 00:08:40.289 --> 00:08:42.590 Well, OK, so what are we going to do? 00:08:42.590 --> 00:08:45.610 We need an inner language, and maybe we can start just by 00:08:45.610 --> 00:08:48.690 saying, let's have something that looks sort 00:08:48.690 --> 00:08:49.980 of familiar to us. 00:08:49.980 --> 00:08:55.290 We have an object and it's supported by some other 00:08:55.290 --> 00:08:57.960 objects, so those are support relations. 00:09:02.680 --> 00:09:05.850 That's one example of what we might call a semantic net. 00:09:05.850 --> 00:09:10.940 It's a network that's got nodes and links, it's got-- 00:09:10.940 --> 00:09:12.640 it has some meaning. 00:09:12.640 --> 00:09:14.790 That's where the word "semantic" comes from. 00:09:14.790 --> 00:09:18.760 Well, we might have another example that looks like this. 00:09:18.760 --> 00:09:30.640 There's Macbeth, there's Duncan, and Macbeth murders 00:09:30.640 --> 00:09:39.870 Duncan, then we also know, somehow, there's a kill 00:09:39.870 --> 00:09:43.720 involved as a consequence, and then ultimately, 00:09:43.720 --> 00:09:46.300 Duncan has a property. 00:09:53.500 --> 00:09:55.870 And that property is the property of being dead. 00:09:58.460 --> 00:10:01.530 So there's another semantic net recording something that 00:10:01.530 --> 00:10:06.030 happens in Shakespeare's Macbeth plot. 00:10:06.030 --> 00:10:07.880 Now, we can decorate that a little bit. 00:10:07.880 --> 00:10:11.200 So as to get a couple of other concepts in play. 00:10:11.200 --> 00:10:14.090 First of all, the thing we've got already is we've got 00:10:14.090 --> 00:10:15.340 combinators. 00:10:22.520 --> 00:10:23.770 Then combinators. 00:10:26.570 --> 00:10:30.590 Well, a fancy name for those links that connect the nodes. 00:10:30.590 --> 00:10:34.410 Another thing we've got is an opportunity for connecting the 00:10:34.410 --> 00:10:36.370 links themselves. 00:10:36.370 --> 00:10:41.920 So the murder sort of implies the kill, and the kill leads 00:10:41.920 --> 00:10:45.170 us to conclude that the victim is dead. 00:10:45.170 --> 00:10:50.720 So that is treating the links themselves as objects that can 00:10:50.720 --> 00:10:54.240 be the subject or object of other links. 00:10:54.240 --> 00:11:04.630 So we call that process "reification." 00:11:04.630 --> 00:11:08.100 Now, in artificial intelligence, semantic nets 00:11:08.100 --> 00:11:11.460 we're all over the early work, but if you have a big network 00:11:11.460 --> 00:11:14.780 that covers the wall you need some way of putting a 00:11:14.780 --> 00:11:17.810 spotlight on some pieces of it. 00:11:17.810 --> 00:11:22.580 So Marvin Minsky put a lot of technical content into that 00:11:22.580 --> 00:11:26.830 idea and created the notion of-- 00:11:26.830 --> 00:11:30.210 a notion that deserves another color here-- 00:11:30.210 --> 00:11:33.850 he suggested that we need a localization process, so we 00:11:33.850 --> 00:11:38.110 have frames, so-called frames or templates. 00:11:38.110 --> 00:11:41.340 And a frame for this murder action might be that there's a 00:11:41.340 --> 00:11:51.450 murder frame that has an agent and has a victim, and the 00:11:51.450 --> 00:11:59.650 agent is Macbeth, and the victim is Duncan. 00:12:02.950 --> 00:12:13.780 So that's a way of putting a localization layer on top of 00:12:13.780 --> 00:12:16.230 what we've got so far. 00:12:16.230 --> 00:12:18.900 Later on, I'll add sequence to that list. 00:12:18.900 --> 00:12:21.820 So this is where it rested for a long time, and in some 00:12:21.820 --> 00:12:25.300 sense, still rests there because as soon as you've got 00:12:25.300 --> 00:12:27.110 combinators, you've got something 00:12:27.110 --> 00:12:30.690 that's pretty much universal. 00:12:30.690 --> 00:12:33.690 You can do anything with it. 00:12:33.690 --> 00:12:37.060 The trouble is it's sort of down at the bit level. 00:12:37.060 --> 00:12:39.390 It's like assembly code. 00:12:39.390 --> 00:12:44.230 It doesn't have, as a concept, enough organization to help 00:12:44.230 --> 00:12:48.360 you go to the next level of achievement. 00:12:48.360 --> 00:12:53.760 There's also a little problem here that deserves also, some 00:12:53.760 --> 00:13:00.770 mention, and that is that we have, over this whole thing, 00:13:00.770 --> 00:13:02.265 the problem of parasitic semantics. 00:13:05.910 --> 00:13:08.695 Parasitic semantics. 00:13:15.318 --> 00:13:18.320 A kind of ugliness that surrounds this whole concept 00:13:18.320 --> 00:13:21.360 because when we look at a diagram like that, and we say, 00:13:21.360 --> 00:13:23.260 oh, Macbeth murdered Duncan, that means 00:13:23.260 --> 00:13:24.880 Duncan's the victim. 00:13:24.880 --> 00:13:27.720 We know there must have been a motive, maybe Macbeth wanted 00:13:27.720 --> 00:13:28.190 to be king. 00:13:28.190 --> 00:13:31.810 Well, we know all that stuff, and there's a tendency to 00:13:31.810 --> 00:13:35.530 project that knowing into the machine. 00:13:35.530 --> 00:13:38.920 If you're going to play with your telephone, please leave. 00:13:41.670 --> 00:13:51.870 So if we project meaning into that that's our understanding 00:13:51.870 --> 00:13:53.750 that's not the machine's understanding. 00:13:53.750 --> 00:13:55.815 So much of the meaning can be said to be parasitic. 00:13:58.700 --> 00:14:00.740 We're the parasite, and we're projecting 00:14:00.740 --> 00:14:02.325 the into that thing. 00:14:02.325 --> 00:14:05.110 Putting that diagram into some machine form doesn't mean the 00:14:05.110 --> 00:14:07.710 machine knows anything. 00:14:07.710 --> 00:14:10.140 It might be able to conclude some things, but it's 00:14:10.140 --> 00:14:13.300 understanding is not grounded in any kind of contact with 00:14:13.300 --> 00:14:14.880 the physical world. 00:14:14.880 --> 00:14:18.310 So we have to worry a lot about that and where 00:14:18.310 --> 00:14:20.460 philosophers would stop there and go off and write a few 00:14:20.460 --> 00:14:22.340 books on the subject. 00:14:22.340 --> 00:14:24.470 But we're not philosophers so we're going to just mention 00:14:24.470 --> 00:14:27.700 the problem and go barreling ahead. 00:14:27.700 --> 00:14:31.220 So we need to use this notion of semantic net, and we have 00:14:31.220 --> 00:14:33.200 to ask ourselves some questions about what elements 00:14:33.200 --> 00:14:35.660 of the inner language are most useful and yet it might be 00:14:35.660 --> 00:14:39.960 very complicated, but here's usefulness number one. 00:14:39.960 --> 00:14:43.330 The notion of classification. 00:14:43.330 --> 00:14:46.660 So we know about stuff, and we know about, 00:14:46.660 --> 00:14:48.055 for example, pianos. 00:14:52.620 --> 00:14:54.055 And we know about tools. 00:14:57.160 --> 00:15:02.300 And we know about maps. 00:15:02.300 --> 00:15:06.010 But we know about those things on different levels. 00:15:06.010 --> 00:15:11.120 So say I'm thinking about a tool, do you have a very good 00:15:11.120 --> 00:15:12.960 image of what I'm talking about? 00:15:12.960 --> 00:15:15.690 The answer has to be no because the notion of a tool 00:15:15.690 --> 00:15:18.960 is very vague, so it's hard to form a picture of 00:15:18.960 --> 00:15:21.360 what that's all about. 00:15:21.360 --> 00:15:24.720 On the other hand, if I said I'm thinking about a mac. 00:15:24.720 --> 00:15:26.990 Well, this is interesting because there's lexical 00:15:26.990 --> 00:15:27.670 ambiguity there. 00:15:27.670 --> 00:15:31.970 You don't know if I'm talking about the Apple type Mac or 00:15:31.970 --> 00:15:35.400 the apple type Mac, or should I say the 00:15:35.400 --> 00:15:38.800 fruit or the computer? 00:15:38.800 --> 00:15:43.660 So there's lexical ambiguity there at two levels or more. 00:15:43.660 --> 00:15:47.260 But let's fill this in a little bit. 00:15:47.260 --> 00:15:49.010 If I know I'm talking about a piano, you can form a picture 00:15:49.010 --> 00:15:51.100 of that so that seems to be on a more detailed level where 00:15:51.100 --> 00:15:52.750 you can do hallucination. 00:15:52.750 --> 00:15:54.720 At a higher level you have just a musical instrument. 00:15:58.730 --> 00:16:01.210 And I can give you a tool to think about by writing hammer. 00:16:06.260 --> 00:16:08.060 And if I'm going to have a mac, it's 00:16:08.060 --> 00:16:10.890 going to be an apple. 00:16:10.890 --> 00:16:15.480 And in this case, I want you to think about a fruit. 00:16:15.480 --> 00:16:17.650 And down here, I can be more specific about 00:16:17.650 --> 00:16:19.850 these things too. 00:16:19.850 --> 00:16:24.330 I can add a slight refinement of detail and say, I'm 00:16:24.330 --> 00:16:25.723 thinking about one of these. 00:16:25.723 --> 00:16:28.014 Do you know what this is? 00:16:28.014 --> 00:16:29.490 STUDENT: [INAUDIBLE]. 00:16:29.490 --> 00:16:32.070 PATRICK WINSTON: No, it's not a mere hammer, it's a 00:16:32.070 --> 00:16:34.590 ball-peen hammer. 00:16:34.590 --> 00:16:36.290 In some circles, it's called a ladies hammer. 00:16:36.290 --> 00:16:38.600 I don't know why. 00:16:38.600 --> 00:16:40.050 But it's-- 00:16:40.050 --> 00:16:42.580 What's it for? 00:16:42.580 --> 00:16:44.420 Most people buy it mostly because it's 00:16:44.420 --> 00:16:46.060 small and light weight. 00:16:46.060 --> 00:16:48.570 But, in fact, it's for metal working. 00:16:48.570 --> 00:16:50.810 It's for taking a piece of sheet metal and pounding it 00:16:50.810 --> 00:16:52.630 out into an ashtray or something 00:16:52.630 --> 00:16:53.870 or for seating rivets. 00:16:53.870 --> 00:16:56.530 It's a metal worker's hammer. 00:16:56.530 --> 00:16:58.450 So you might not have known about that before but now, at 00:16:58.450 --> 00:17:00.300 least, you have a word to hang that knowledge on. 00:17:00.300 --> 00:17:01.620 It's a ball peen hammer. 00:17:06.010 --> 00:17:10.059 So we have various levels here, going from very specific 00:17:10.059 --> 00:17:11.800 to very general. 00:17:11.800 --> 00:17:15.520 And we can even go to a level of specificity for pianos by 00:17:15.520 --> 00:17:16.770 saying we've got a Bosendorfer. 00:17:23.430 --> 00:17:24.680 Why is a Bosendorfer special? 00:17:27.950 --> 00:17:31.240 I mean, is it like a Baldwin? 00:17:31.240 --> 00:17:33.010 Something's [INAUDIBLE], Yoka-- 00:17:37.150 --> 00:17:38.710 Lots of piano types, what's special? 00:17:38.710 --> 00:17:42.110 You see, you don't know because unless you play the 00:17:42.110 --> 00:17:45.290 piano, and probably unless you're a serious piano player 00:17:45.290 --> 00:17:47.082 you don't know that a Bosendorfer-- 00:17:47.082 --> 00:17:48.658 Ariel, you know. 00:17:48.658 --> 00:17:51.950 STUDENT: I think its supposed to have an extra octave at the 00:17:51.950 --> 00:17:52.610 bottom, black keys. 00:17:52.610 --> 00:17:53.600 Pretty cool. 00:17:53.600 --> 00:17:56.580 PATRICK WINSTON: It's got some extra keys at the bottom. 00:17:56.580 --> 00:17:58.240 And most people don't know that unless they're serious 00:17:58.240 --> 00:17:59.350 about the piano. 00:17:59.350 --> 00:18:01.160 Some professional piano players, when they're 00:18:01.160 --> 00:18:04.110 confronted with a Bosendorfer have to have someone cover 00:18:04.110 --> 00:18:07.790 those keys because it screws up their peripheral vision, 00:18:07.790 --> 00:18:09.420 and hit the wrong key. 00:18:09.420 --> 00:18:10.410 Because they're not used to having those 00:18:10.410 --> 00:18:12.780 extra keys at the bottom. 00:18:12.780 --> 00:18:15.365 So that's a little detail but the Bosendorfer. 00:18:15.365 --> 00:18:19.470 So you can make a kind of graph, and you can say, let's 00:18:19.470 --> 00:18:31.140 go from low, very general, to a basic level, 00:18:31.140 --> 00:18:32.580 to a specific level. 00:18:36.170 --> 00:18:41.550 So it is the case in human knowledge that that graph has 00:18:41.550 --> 00:18:43.920 a tendency to look sort of like this. 00:18:49.030 --> 00:18:53.650 So here's tool, here's hammer, here's ball peen. 00:18:53.650 --> 00:18:57.540 So that level, where you have a big jump, that's the general 00:18:57.540 --> 00:18:58.840 to basic level of transition. 00:19:01.580 --> 00:19:04.070 So that basic level is probably there because that's 00:19:04.070 --> 00:19:08.090 the level on which we hang a huge amount of our knowledge. 00:19:08.090 --> 00:19:12.200 We know a lot about pianos, and it all seems to be hanging 00:19:12.200 --> 00:19:14.070 on that word piano, which gives us 00:19:14.070 --> 00:19:16.980 power with the concept. 00:19:16.980 --> 00:19:20.680 So that's example number one of an element 00:19:20.680 --> 00:19:21.600 of our inner language. 00:19:21.600 --> 00:19:25.860 The ability to assemble things into hierarchies like that, 00:19:25.860 --> 00:19:30.740 and hang knowledge about those objects on the elements in 00:19:30.740 --> 00:19:31.990 that hierarchy. 00:19:35.220 --> 00:19:37.790 Well, given that you have elements in the hierarchy, how 00:19:37.790 --> 00:19:38.650 do you talk about them? 00:19:38.650 --> 00:19:41.740 Well, I like to consider the possibility, just for the sake 00:19:41.740 --> 00:19:44.750 of illustration, that you're thinking about a car crashing 00:19:44.750 --> 00:19:46.750 into a wall. 00:19:46.750 --> 00:19:50.220 So you've got things to think about like the speed of the 00:19:50.220 --> 00:20:04.705 car, the distance to the wall, and the condition of the car. 00:20:08.790 --> 00:20:12.110 And you've got the period before the crash, during the 00:20:12.110 --> 00:20:14.650 crash, and after the crash. 00:20:14.650 --> 00:20:18.390 So you might want to think about how to talk about those 00:20:18.390 --> 00:20:20.725 objects in those three time periods. 00:20:23.790 --> 00:20:30.410 So we can do that with a vocabulary of change and we do 00:20:30.410 --> 00:20:34.400 that because we believe that most of human thinking is 00:20:34.400 --> 00:20:37.360 thinking about change causing change. 00:20:37.360 --> 00:20:41.070 And that flies in the face of what we learned as engineers. 00:20:41.070 --> 00:20:44.995 Because in engineering, we learn about state, and once 00:20:44.995 --> 00:20:47.900 you know the state of the system, you know everything 00:20:47.900 --> 00:20:50.020 you need to know in order to predict the future. 00:20:50.020 --> 00:20:53.640 The trouble is, in our heads, thinking about everything 00:20:53.640 --> 00:20:56.007 there is in the world, including the current phase of 00:20:56.007 --> 00:20:58.530 the moon, is too much stuff. 00:20:58.530 --> 00:21:03.950 So mostly, our thinking, we think, is hinging on the idea 00:21:03.950 --> 00:21:06.530 that change leads to change. 00:21:06.530 --> 00:21:09.620 So that's why we have a vocabulary of change. 00:21:09.620 --> 00:21:14.460 So in the period before the crash, the speed of the car is 00:21:14.460 --> 00:21:15.090 not changing. 00:21:15.090 --> 00:21:18.600 There's a little notation for not change, no delta. 00:21:18.600 --> 00:21:22.790 The distance to the wall, that's decreasing. 00:21:22.790 --> 00:21:27.370 The condition of the car, that's not changing. 00:21:27.370 --> 00:21:30.210 Then, the car hits the wall. 00:21:30.210 --> 00:21:33.810 So the speed of the car disappears, the distance to 00:21:33.810 --> 00:21:37.950 the wall disappears, and the condition of the car will 00:21:37.950 --> 00:21:40.010 change dramatically. 00:21:40.010 --> 00:21:44.110 Finally, after the crash is over, the speed of the car 00:21:44.110 --> 00:21:45.740 does not appear. 00:21:45.740 --> 00:21:50.520 The distance to the wall does not change, and the condition 00:21:50.520 --> 00:21:53.550 of the car also does not change. 00:21:53.550 --> 00:21:57.020 So that's hinting at a vocabulary of change, and its 00:21:57.020 --> 00:22:00.470 use, which will be the second element in our development of 00:22:00.470 --> 00:22:04.950 a vocabulary of ways in which we might have constructed are 00:22:04.950 --> 00:22:06.700 inner language. 00:22:06.700 --> 00:22:10.800 So this a particular idea, that's classification. 00:22:10.800 --> 00:22:17.930 This is transition, and a system that purports to 00:22:17.930 --> 00:22:20.850 understand stories with a heavy emphasis on this notion 00:22:20.850 --> 00:22:25.450 of transition and we believe, that is to say, I think, that 00:22:25.450 --> 00:22:31.880 that vocabulary has to have decrease, increase, change, 00:22:31.880 --> 00:22:35.000 appear, and disappear. 00:22:35.000 --> 00:22:39.910 So there are 10 things you can have in such diagrams. 00:22:39.910 --> 00:22:41.070 I've done five. 00:22:41.070 --> 00:22:47.110 That's because, for each of those, there's a not 00:22:47.110 --> 00:22:50.070 variation on that. 00:22:50.070 --> 00:22:52.270 So with a vocabulary of 10 things can go a long way 00:22:52.270 --> 00:22:55.250 toward helping to describe things that are in process of 00:22:55.250 --> 00:22:56.980 change and making transition. 00:22:56.980 --> 00:22:59.200 And we have a lot of those words in our vocabulary. 00:22:59.200 --> 00:23:00.680 We use those words a lot in our vocabulary. 00:23:00.680 --> 00:23:03.380 They seem heavily connected with vision. 00:23:03.380 --> 00:23:05.700 Our friend appeared. 00:23:05.700 --> 00:23:07.580 The cat disappeared. 00:23:07.580 --> 00:23:09.910 The speed increased. 00:23:09.910 --> 00:23:11.675 So this is a description of a crash. 00:23:16.090 --> 00:23:20.430 In terms of those kinds of elements, now, I say to you, 00:23:20.430 --> 00:23:23.410 how does a camera work? 00:23:23.410 --> 00:23:31.160 Well, I could say the camera works because a photon crashes 00:23:31.160 --> 00:23:32.410 into a photo receptor. 00:23:34.700 --> 00:23:37.450 So when I say a photon crashes into a photo receptors, why am 00:23:37.450 --> 00:23:40.230 I saying that, and how does it help? 00:23:40.230 --> 00:23:42.890 I'm saying that and it helps because it's the same pattern 00:23:42.890 --> 00:23:46.390 of change you already know about when you talk about a 00:23:46.390 --> 00:23:48.560 car crashing into a wall. 00:23:48.560 --> 00:23:50.180 How does that work? 00:23:50.180 --> 00:24:03.790 The speed of the photon, the distance of the photon to the 00:24:03.790 --> 00:24:09.470 receptor, and the condition of the receptor. 00:24:13.680 --> 00:24:16.720 So analogies like that are very much of the core of what 00:24:16.720 --> 00:24:18.700 we think about all the time. 00:24:18.700 --> 00:24:23.630 Really then, there is representation number two. 00:24:23.630 --> 00:24:27.040 Number one is class, number two is transition, and now, 00:24:27.040 --> 00:24:33.600 you're ready for number three, which is trajectory. 00:24:33.600 --> 00:24:37.960 Linguists, who study sentences, often talk in terms 00:24:37.960 --> 00:24:41.430 of fundamental patterns that seemed to be in a lot of what 00:24:41.430 --> 00:24:45.670 we say, and a lot of what we say is about objects moving 00:24:45.670 --> 00:24:46.920 along trajectories. 00:24:49.520 --> 00:24:51.375 So we can talk about a trajectory frame. 00:25:00.680 --> 00:25:02.650 And a trajectory frame will have elements like this. 00:25:02.650 --> 00:25:05.750 It has an object moving on a trajectory that ends up at a 00:25:05.750 --> 00:25:07.000 destination. 00:25:11.000 --> 00:25:12.715 You might start out at a source. 00:25:16.450 --> 00:25:21.970 It's probably been arranged by some kind of agent, and the 00:25:21.970 --> 00:25:26.840 agent may assist himself making the motion happen with 00:25:26.840 --> 00:25:28.090 some kind of instrument. 00:25:33.700 --> 00:25:35.300 There might be somebody helping out 00:25:35.300 --> 00:25:37.030 over here, a co-agent. 00:25:41.490 --> 00:25:42.620 Well, what else can we have? 00:25:42.620 --> 00:25:47.235 A beneficiary, someone is helped out by the action. 00:25:55.570 --> 00:25:59.240 Sometimes, the motion is arranged by a conveyance. 00:26:05.450 --> 00:26:12.180 So these are a lot of slots, finite slots, and descriptions 00:26:12.180 --> 00:26:14.460 of actions, many of which involve motion on a 00:26:14.460 --> 00:26:16.300 trajectory. 00:26:16.300 --> 00:26:19.650 We have a tendency in language to decorate these things in 00:26:19.650 --> 00:26:22.540 one way or another, depending on the language. 00:26:22.540 --> 00:26:24.690 And so in many languages, the decoration is by way of 00:26:24.690 --> 00:26:26.350 position in the sentence. 00:26:26.350 --> 00:26:29.400 In English, it's often by way of a preposition. 00:26:29.400 --> 00:26:39.430 It's used to help zero in on a particular role of an object 00:26:39.430 --> 00:26:42.550 in the trajectory scenario. 00:26:42.550 --> 00:26:49.110 So if I say, I baked a cake with a friend, there's a with 00:26:49.110 --> 00:26:51.040 preposition. 00:26:51.040 --> 00:26:54.750 If I baked a cake for a friend, the friend is the 00:26:54.750 --> 00:26:56.160 beneficiary. 00:26:56.160 --> 00:27:01.390 If I baked a cake with an oven, that's an instrument. 00:27:01.390 --> 00:27:08.480 The object may be moving to a destination from a source, and 00:27:08.480 --> 00:27:11.460 if I'm going to New York by train, I put a 00:27:11.460 --> 00:27:14.080 by on top of that. 00:27:14.080 --> 00:27:16.290 If the agent isn't in subject position, I would say 00:27:16.290 --> 00:27:18.700 something like, oh, I see all the work 00:27:18.700 --> 00:27:21.520 was done by a student. 00:27:21.520 --> 00:27:23.950 So those prepositions have a tendency to help us zoom in on 00:27:23.950 --> 00:27:27.130 the actual role of particular objects in this whole package, 00:27:27.130 --> 00:27:29.630 the whole frame. 00:27:29.630 --> 00:27:31.300 So this is number three. 00:27:34.320 --> 00:27:36.490 There's a variation on this in which there's no actual 00:27:36.490 --> 00:27:39.930 trajectory in which case we'll just call that a role frame. 00:27:39.930 --> 00:27:41.780 Because if there's no trajectory, we can still have 00:27:41.780 --> 00:27:44.915 things such as an instrument, a co-agent, and a beneficiary. 00:27:47.450 --> 00:27:50.120 So now, we've got three representations. 00:27:50.120 --> 00:27:51.410 You might say, well, what good are they? 00:27:51.410 --> 00:27:53.680 And you can determine what good they are these days 00:27:53.680 --> 00:27:57.460 because it's easier to go over established corpuses, and say, 00:27:57.460 --> 00:28:01.700 what fraction of those, of the sentences, in such a corpus 00:28:01.700 --> 00:28:07.660 involve classification or a transition or a trajectory. 00:28:07.660 --> 00:28:10.170 The most well known of these is the so-called Wall Street 00:28:10.170 --> 00:28:10.810 Journal Corpus. 00:28:10.810 --> 00:28:14.790 It has 50,000 sentences in it, drawn from some period of 00:28:14.790 --> 00:28:22.700 time, all the syntactical language types work with that 00:28:22.700 --> 00:28:24.530 corpus a great deal. 00:28:24.530 --> 00:28:26.570 And we worked with it a little bit too, to see what fraction 00:28:26.570 --> 00:28:31.210 of the sentences or what the density of trajectories and 00:28:31.210 --> 00:28:34.170 transitions are in those sentences. 00:28:34.170 --> 00:28:38.010 So I have to say that a little more carefully, because the 00:28:38.010 --> 00:28:48.730 finding is that in 100 sentences you'll find about 25 00:28:48.730 --> 00:28:52.120 transitions or trajectories. 00:28:52.120 --> 00:28:54.590 So they're very densely represented. 00:28:54.590 --> 00:28:56.270 They're often very abstract. 00:28:56.270 --> 00:29:05.470 Prices rose, the economy went to someplace, but there are 00:29:05.470 --> 00:29:08.100 still words that denote transition or trajectory. 00:29:10.660 --> 00:29:14.800 Of course, once you have all this stuff, that you have then 00:29:14.800 --> 00:29:17.110 have a desire to put it together. 00:29:17.110 --> 00:29:22.810 So the next thing we need to talk about is story sequences. 00:29:22.810 --> 00:29:27.200 So a story sequence can be a single sentence, and I want to 00:29:27.200 --> 00:29:30.135 illustrate that with one of my favorites. 00:29:35.050 --> 00:29:36.300 Here's the sentences. 00:29:48.220 --> 00:29:50.915 I think I've chosen a gender neutral name so as not getting 00:29:50.915 --> 00:29:52.270 in any trouble. 00:29:52.270 --> 00:29:56.600 So Pat, but I don't call myself Pat because I decided 00:29:56.600 --> 00:29:58.570 when I was 18 years old that pat is a unit 00:29:58.570 --> 00:30:00.470 of measure for butter. 00:30:00.470 --> 00:30:02.550 In any case, with Pat comforted, Mary, do you have 00:30:02.550 --> 00:30:06.100 an image of what happened? 00:30:06.100 --> 00:30:08.940 Probably not a very firm image. 00:30:08.940 --> 00:30:13.520 You know that Pat did something, but you don't know 00:30:13.520 --> 00:30:15.790 exactly what. 00:30:15.790 --> 00:30:19.150 Nevertheless, when Pat comforted Chris, you can 00:30:19.150 --> 00:30:26.000 construct something that looks like a role frame. 00:30:26.000 --> 00:30:32.930 Because the role frame for that would have an agent, and 00:30:32.930 --> 00:30:35.840 that would be Pat. 00:30:35.840 --> 00:30:37.090 There's an action. 00:30:39.740 --> 00:30:41.760 We're going to put a question mark in there because we don't 00:30:41.760 --> 00:30:44.760 have a very firm image of what the action is. 00:30:44.760 --> 00:30:51.190 Then again, we're building a wall frame, like so. 00:30:51.190 --> 00:30:52.440 The object is Chris. 00:30:56.230 --> 00:30:59.140 Oh, you know that is the object. 00:31:08.160 --> 00:31:09.710 Is there anything else we can say? 00:31:09.710 --> 00:31:12.820 Oh, yes, we can probably say something more. 00:31:12.820 --> 00:31:15.630 Something else comes to mind when you see 00:31:15.630 --> 00:31:17.910 Pat comforted Chris. 00:31:17.910 --> 00:31:23.120 There's a sort of result, and the result is 00:31:23.120 --> 00:31:24.370 a transition frame. 00:31:28.515 --> 00:31:36.370 And the transition frame involves an object, which is 00:31:36.370 --> 00:31:50.570 Chris, and Chris has a mood, which presumably, is improved. 00:31:50.570 --> 00:31:53.460 It goes up. 00:31:53.460 --> 00:31:54.855 Did you have something, Elliott? 00:31:54.855 --> 00:31:58.320 STUDENT: Could you, I guess, analogize the Pat comforted 00:31:58.320 --> 00:32:04.260 Chris to something like Pat gave comfort to Chris as Chris 00:32:04.260 --> 00:32:06.240 is the destination? 00:32:06.240 --> 00:32:08.715 And couldn't this be [INAUDIBLE]? 00:32:08.715 --> 00:32:11.550 PATRICK WINSTON: Elliott is wandering into a very 00:32:11.550 --> 00:32:14.250 interesting area having to do with, couldn't you think about 00:32:14.250 --> 00:32:17.860 this in another way and think of it as something moving 00:32:17.860 --> 00:32:19.230 along a trajectory. 00:32:19.230 --> 00:32:24.600 Comfort is moving, if not from Pat, at least to Chris. 00:32:24.600 --> 00:32:26.610 And that's a very important kind of observation because 00:32:26.610 --> 00:32:30.220 what it would suggest is there can be a utility in thinking 00:32:30.220 --> 00:32:33.300 of things in multiple ways, multiple representations. 00:32:33.300 --> 00:32:37.040 Marvin Minsky has a wonderful aphoristic phrase, which is, 00:32:37.040 --> 00:32:40.700 if you can only think about something in one way, you have 00:32:40.700 --> 00:32:43.160 no recourse when you get stuck. 00:32:43.160 --> 00:32:46.630 So multiple representations mean you have multiple ways of 00:32:46.630 --> 00:32:50.340 gathering regularity from the world, and collecting it and 00:32:50.340 --> 00:32:52.250 therefore that'll make you smarter. 00:32:52.250 --> 00:32:56.080 So yes, you could do that, and that would be a compliment to 00:32:56.080 --> 00:32:58.020 what I'm doing now. 00:32:58.020 --> 00:32:59.490 Let me continue what I'm doing now. 00:32:59.490 --> 00:33:01.780 So what have I done? 00:33:01.780 --> 00:33:05.720 I've got a role frame and a tradition frame, and the 00:33:05.720 --> 00:33:09.550 transition frame is the target of the result 00:33:09.550 --> 00:33:12.350 slot in the role frame. 00:33:15.110 --> 00:33:17.230 Now, we can modify this a little bit. 00:33:20.440 --> 00:33:24.060 And maybe want to say, instead of comforted, terrorized. 00:33:30.840 --> 00:33:33.490 And how would that change things? 00:33:33.490 --> 00:33:37.490 We don't know exactly what Pat did so the 00:33:37.490 --> 00:33:40.180 action remains unknown. 00:33:40.180 --> 00:33:42.670 The agent and the object are the same. 00:33:42.670 --> 00:33:45.010 But the result here is presumably that 00:33:45.010 --> 00:33:49.590 the mood went down. 00:33:49.590 --> 00:33:51.550 With just what we've got so far, we can answer a lot of 00:33:51.550 --> 00:33:52.460 questions, by the way. 00:33:52.460 --> 00:33:55.010 Once we've got the sentence understood in these terms, we 00:33:55.010 --> 00:33:57.210 can say who did the thing? 00:33:57.210 --> 00:33:58.030 What's this all about? 00:33:58.030 --> 00:33:59.490 And the answer is Pat. 00:33:59.490 --> 00:34:00.330 What did Pat do? 00:34:00.330 --> 00:34:02.130 Comfort, terrorized. 00:34:02.130 --> 00:34:03.910 Who do they do it too? 00:34:03.910 --> 00:34:05.310 Who was the object? 00:34:05.310 --> 00:34:06.780 It's Chris. 00:34:06.780 --> 00:34:08.350 What was the result? 00:34:08.350 --> 00:34:09.949 Chris felt better. 00:34:09.949 --> 00:34:12.260 Chris felt worse. 00:34:12.260 --> 00:34:14.639 So these representations already give us a question and 00:34:14.639 --> 00:34:22.219 answering capability that makes for an understanding of 00:34:22.219 --> 00:34:24.760 the sentence. 00:34:24.760 --> 00:34:26.920 But still, we haven't been very specific, so our next 00:34:26.920 --> 00:34:31.310 step takes this same sentence in a more specific direction. 00:34:31.310 --> 00:34:32.770 So here's a way that goes. 00:34:35.300 --> 00:34:40.469 Kissed Chris. 00:34:40.469 --> 00:34:44.530 Now, you begin to get a sense of what's going on, you form a 00:34:44.530 --> 00:34:47.629 mental image, so you could have a hallucination. 00:34:53.920 --> 00:34:57.870 And that hallucinations will also be a kind of frame, but, 00:34:57.870 --> 00:35:00.570 in this case, it'll be a trajectory frame. 00:35:05.570 --> 00:35:11.475 And the object would be, I don't know, Pat's lips. 00:35:16.230 --> 00:35:23.450 And the destination will be Chris' lips. 00:35:26.670 --> 00:35:29.490 I don't know, is that right? 00:35:29.490 --> 00:35:30.400 It depends. 00:35:30.400 --> 00:35:31.350 It depends. 00:35:31.350 --> 00:35:34.800 Have you all formed a picture of what's going on here? 00:35:34.800 --> 00:35:40.080 So it will be different depending on whether Chris is 00:35:40.080 --> 00:35:47.970 Pat's girlfriend or if Chris is Pat's daughter or if Chris 00:35:47.970 --> 00:35:53.830 is a frog and Pat is a prince -ess, I guess, the way the 00:35:53.830 --> 00:35:55.080 story usually goes. 00:35:58.080 --> 00:36:01.080 So somehow we have, in our heads, all kinds of libraries 00:36:01.080 --> 00:36:03.490 that help us to form mental pictures of things when we see 00:36:03.490 --> 00:36:06.470 things like kissed. 00:36:06.470 --> 00:36:10.870 So one final one just to show the variety. 00:36:10.870 --> 00:36:13.920 We could say that Pat stabbed Chris. 00:36:20.670 --> 00:36:23.410 What changes? 00:36:23.410 --> 00:36:28.550 Let's see, in the case of kissed, the mood is going up. 00:36:28.550 --> 00:36:31.760 In the case of stabbed, the mood is going down. 00:36:31.760 --> 00:36:36.710 You can also probably say that the health is going down. 00:36:36.710 --> 00:36:38.750 And the destination is Chris' body. 00:36:41.310 --> 00:36:43.700 And the object that's moving is Pat's knife. 00:36:47.660 --> 00:36:51.460 We get the same pattern with both of those sentences. 00:36:51.460 --> 00:36:55.060 So both of them involve a sequence that starts off with 00:36:55.060 --> 00:36:58.080 the action, moves to a transition and a trajectory 00:36:58.080 --> 00:37:00.140 and those are all arranged in a line. 00:37:00.140 --> 00:37:06.790 And that line is something that gives us a lot of power 00:37:06.790 --> 00:37:10.460 over the situation relative to a semantic net. 00:37:10.460 --> 00:37:14.360 So I'm going to decorate that one more time, and say that 00:37:14.360 --> 00:37:16.580 another element we get out of our 00:37:16.580 --> 00:37:19.160 internal language is sequence. 00:37:19.160 --> 00:37:24.110 An element we need in order to have anything that looks like 00:37:24.110 --> 00:37:27.510 an account of an inner language is sequence. 00:37:27.510 --> 00:37:30.370 Because if you think about things being arrayed in a vast 00:37:30.370 --> 00:37:32.520 spreading network, it's hard to deal with them. 00:37:32.520 --> 00:37:36.320 But if you thing about things being arrayed along a line, in 00:37:36.320 --> 00:37:42.490 a sequence of actions or events, like so, then that 00:37:42.490 --> 00:37:45.530 imposes enough constraint to get a handle on 00:37:45.530 --> 00:37:47.330 what's going on. 00:37:47.330 --> 00:37:52.050 So what we're going to call this is the representation, 00:37:52.050 --> 00:37:56.100 and I guess I'm up to one, two, three, four. 00:37:56.100 --> 00:37:58.130 This is a representation of story sequence. 00:38:06.660 --> 00:38:09.420 so even though that's a kind of micro-story, it's still an 00:38:09.420 --> 00:38:13.510 example of a story sequence because we get the power out 00:38:13.510 --> 00:38:17.406 of it by arranging everything in a line. 00:38:17.406 --> 00:38:20.400 You have a sense, I think, especially if you play a 00:38:20.400 --> 00:38:24.160 musical instrument, on how dependent we are on sequence. 00:38:24.160 --> 00:38:26.580 So if you play a musical instrument, you probably know 00:38:26.580 --> 00:38:31.270 how difficult it is to start replaying a piece of music 00:38:31.270 --> 00:38:33.380 from the middle of a measure. 00:38:33.380 --> 00:38:35.440 You have to go back to at least the beginning of the 00:38:35.440 --> 00:38:37.545 measure, and probably to the beginning of the phrase, if 00:38:37.545 --> 00:38:39.330 not the beginning of the piece. 00:38:39.330 --> 00:38:43.880 So our memory seems to be, at least in music, very rooted in 00:38:43.880 --> 00:38:46.250 the idea of sequences. 00:38:46.250 --> 00:38:48.475 And that's often true of storytelling too. 00:38:48.475 --> 00:38:52.100 We have to go back to the beginning of at least a scene, 00:38:52.100 --> 00:38:56.260 because somehow these things are arranged in sequences that 00:38:56.260 --> 00:39:03.070 form, somehow, usefulness out of their sequentialness. 00:39:03.070 --> 00:39:05.280 So there's one more thing we can talk about and that is the 00:39:05.280 --> 00:39:11.920 idea of not just the idea of how these sequences are 00:39:11.920 --> 00:39:14.840 constructed and what they're constructed out of, but we can 00:39:14.840 --> 00:39:19.300 also talk a little bit in terms of libraries of stories. 00:39:27.640 --> 00:39:29.840 And when we talk about libraries of stories, we can 00:39:29.840 --> 00:39:33.350 think about kind of the sort of standard stories that we 00:39:33.350 --> 00:39:36.290 have and how they're arranged, and how we can know a lot 00:39:36.290 --> 00:39:39.840 about something by what it's super class is. 00:39:39.840 --> 00:39:43.770 So it's a variation on the theme of learning stuff from 00:39:43.770 --> 00:39:45.520 the super classes. 00:39:45.520 --> 00:39:47.840 So here's an event frame. 00:39:50.780 --> 00:39:54.990 And then, in addition to event frames, 00:39:54.990 --> 00:39:56.260 there's disaster frames. 00:39:59.700 --> 00:40:00.950 And then there are party frames. 00:40:04.320 --> 00:40:11.010 And parties and disasters are both events. 00:40:11.010 --> 00:40:13.520 And when we talk about disasters, we know, in turn, 00:40:13.520 --> 00:40:15.630 they break up in a variety of things. 00:40:15.630 --> 00:40:22.805 We have earthquake disasters, and maybe we have hurricanes. 00:40:27.890 --> 00:40:30.440 And in the party world we have, I don't know, birthday 00:40:30.440 --> 00:40:36.300 parties, and we have weddings. 00:40:41.310 --> 00:40:44.920 And each of these types of frames invites us to fill in 00:40:44.920 --> 00:40:46.050 particular slots. 00:40:46.050 --> 00:40:47.910 So if we're reading a newspaper story about a 00:40:47.910 --> 00:40:51.730 wedding, we know that we're going to be learning the same 00:40:51.730 --> 00:40:54.870 sorts of things we will learn about any party except there 00:40:54.870 --> 00:40:58.790 is the additional information that we expect that says 00:40:58.790 --> 00:41:01.040 something about the bride and the groom. 00:41:10.220 --> 00:41:13.150 If we have a raw event and we don't know anything more about 00:41:13.150 --> 00:41:14.630 it than that, there's a time and place. 00:41:20.480 --> 00:41:23.800 If it's a disaster frame, it gets a grizzly over here, but 00:41:23.800 --> 00:41:31.080 if there's a disaster frame, we might have the fatalities, 00:41:31.080 --> 00:41:34.800 and how much it cost. 00:41:34.800 --> 00:41:40.800 If it's an earthquake frame, we need to know the magnitude 00:41:40.800 --> 00:41:42.920 of the quake, and the name of the fault. 00:41:46.540 --> 00:41:53.050 If it's a hurricane, we have the category and the name. 00:41:56.140 --> 00:42:01.040 So each of these things up there can be viewed, not just 00:42:01.040 --> 00:42:05.690 an example of something, but as a new frame all by itself. 00:42:05.690 --> 00:42:10.500 As we mature, we have these first four things as building 00:42:10.500 --> 00:42:14.470 blocks, and then, we educate ourselves, and we get all 00:42:14.470 --> 00:42:16.370 those kinds of frames that help us to 00:42:16.370 --> 00:42:19.290 understand the world. 00:42:19.290 --> 00:42:24.150 But how to fill those in from a newspaper story can be 00:42:24.150 --> 00:42:25.780 sometimes, quite a challenge. 00:42:25.780 --> 00:42:29.910 Actually the worst thing to understand is children's 00:42:29.910 --> 00:42:36.820 stories because, and this was determined experimentally when 00:42:36.820 --> 00:42:39.350 people tried to understand children's stories, because it 00:42:39.350 --> 00:42:45.450 turns out that children's stories are not simpler than 00:42:45.450 --> 00:42:46.540 the stories we write for adults. 00:42:46.540 --> 00:42:50.550 In many cases, they're harder. 00:42:50.550 --> 00:42:52.350 If you read about Shakespearean plots, it's all 00:42:52.350 --> 00:42:56.360 about intrigue, murder, jealousy, greed, but when 00:42:56.360 --> 00:42:58.540 you're trying to write a children's story it can be 00:42:58.540 --> 00:43:01.300 about anything. 00:43:01.300 --> 00:43:08.200 And worse yet, the children's story often raises problems 00:43:08.200 --> 00:43:09.830 that you don't see in newspaper stories. 00:43:09.830 --> 00:43:11.080 Let me illustrate that for you. 00:43:19.310 --> 00:43:20.560 You want to read that story? 00:43:25.080 --> 00:43:27.670 You have no trouble figuring it out, of course, but think 00:43:27.670 --> 00:43:30.090 about a poor machine. 00:43:30.090 --> 00:43:32.570 It's struggling to understand anything. 00:43:32.570 --> 00:43:33.820 What's going to be the problem? 00:43:36.010 --> 00:43:37.700 It's going to have trouble figuring out those pronoun 00:43:37.700 --> 00:43:39.480 antecedents. 00:43:39.480 --> 00:43:39.990 Look at them. 00:43:39.990 --> 00:43:41.240 They're complicated. 00:43:43.620 --> 00:43:45.750 [MUSIC PLAYING] 00:43:45.750 --> 00:43:47.000 PATRICK WINSTON: Shut [INAUDIBLE]. 00:43:51.755 --> 00:43:53.005 Oh, that's the way. 00:43:56.960 --> 00:43:58.210 [INAUDIBLE]. 00:44:00.640 --> 00:44:03.000 Here are the pronouns. 00:44:03.000 --> 00:44:05.940 One of them wanted to buy a kite. 00:44:05.940 --> 00:44:07.240 He has one, he said. 00:44:07.240 --> 00:44:10.230 He will make you take it back. 00:44:10.230 --> 00:44:11.030 So that's pretty hard. 00:44:11.030 --> 00:44:14.790 Actually, the principal here that I'm driving at is, when 00:44:14.790 --> 00:44:17.750 you have a new story or any story, if you have an old 00:44:17.750 --> 00:44:19.080 story but you want to read it-- when you want to 00:44:19.080 --> 00:44:23.350 understand it quickly, the instantiation of it quickly, 00:44:23.350 --> 00:44:26.980 you need to be sure that, if you're the storyteller, you 00:44:26.980 --> 00:44:29.650 don't add to the burden of the understanding any syntactic 00:44:29.650 --> 00:44:30.840 difficulty. 00:44:30.840 --> 00:44:32.790 So that's an example of telling a story with 00:44:32.790 --> 00:44:35.470 additional syntactic difficulty. 00:44:35.470 --> 00:44:39.360 No newspaper journalist would ever write 00:44:39.360 --> 00:44:41.000 the story like that. 00:44:41.000 --> 00:44:42.790 Here's how they would write it. 00:44:47.760 --> 00:44:50.130 They would even give you a clue that there's certain 00:44:50.130 --> 00:44:52.720 information you're never going to get, like 00:44:52.720 --> 00:44:54.600 who told the story. 00:44:54.600 --> 00:44:58.070 It's that reliable sources business. 00:44:58.070 --> 00:45:02.550 So this brings us to the final bit that I want to deal with 00:45:02.550 --> 00:45:05.150 today, and what I'm going to do is, if you came into this 00:45:05.150 --> 00:45:09.660 class today as a 97 pound writing weakling, you're about 00:45:09.660 --> 00:45:14.730 to emerge as a 250 pound mountain of a writer. 00:45:14.730 --> 00:45:16.630 Because I want to tell you a few tricks that will make you 00:45:16.630 --> 00:45:20.540 usually better as a writer, especially if 00:45:20.540 --> 00:45:25.200 you're Russian or German. 00:45:25.200 --> 00:45:27.120 And here's how it works. 00:45:27.120 --> 00:45:28.370 Rule one. 00:45:44.920 --> 00:45:47.640 Because they place additional syntactic burden on the 00:45:47.640 --> 00:45:50.520 understanding of the story by the reader. 00:45:50.520 --> 00:45:53.450 So if you're telling somebody about some difficult new 00:45:53.450 --> 00:45:56.740 technical idea, the last thing you want them to do is to 00:45:56.740 --> 00:45:58.990 burden their syntactic processor with figuring out 00:45:58.990 --> 00:46:01.040 pronoun antecedents. 00:46:01.040 --> 00:46:03.240 So don't use pronouns in you're writing, technical 00:46:03.240 --> 00:46:05.800 writing, at least, will be much clearer. 00:46:05.800 --> 00:46:08.490 By the way, why does this especially apply to Germans 00:46:08.490 --> 00:46:10.230 and Russians? 00:46:10.230 --> 00:46:11.980 Is it because-- 00:46:11.980 --> 00:46:14.900 is this an ethnic origin slur or is this a 00:46:14.900 --> 00:46:16.310 fact about their language? 00:46:16.310 --> 00:46:17.370 It's a fact about their language. 00:46:17.370 --> 00:46:20.380 Where is the fact? 00:46:20.380 --> 00:46:23.570 Why can they get away with pronoun usages that we cannot 00:46:23.570 --> 00:46:25.910 get away with in English? 00:46:25.910 --> 00:46:26.470 Yes, Andrew? 00:46:26.470 --> 00:46:29.802 STUDENT: Gender and also-- 00:46:29.802 --> 00:46:35.240 PATRICK WINSTON: Gender, because if you have all of 00:46:35.240 --> 00:46:42.530 your nouns decorated with gender, that reduces by three, 00:46:42.530 --> 00:46:45.960 the potential for ambiguity in the pronoun antecedent. 00:46:45.960 --> 00:46:48.540 So you'll frequently find that German and Russian writers 00:46:48.540 --> 00:46:50.970 will have pronouns all over the place that are perfectly 00:46:50.970 --> 00:46:52.930 clear to them because of gender. 00:46:52.930 --> 00:46:55.170 They are interpretable by English speakers when 00:46:55.170 --> 00:46:56.890 translated because we don't have the gender to 00:46:56.890 --> 00:46:59.720 help us zero in. 00:46:59.720 --> 00:47:03.890 So these things all have to do with minimizing extra, 00:47:03.890 --> 00:47:06.170 superfluous, gratuitous, unnecessary 00:47:06.170 --> 00:47:07.330 burden on the reader. 00:47:07.330 --> 00:47:13.775 Number two is don't use former or latter. 00:47:16.950 --> 00:47:19.660 You see those words used frequently in technical 00:47:19.660 --> 00:47:21.310 writing, and guess what? 00:47:21.310 --> 00:47:24.400 No human being ever encounters those words without having to 00:47:24.400 --> 00:47:28.370 stop and go back to figure out what they refer to it. 00:47:28.370 --> 00:47:30.970 So that's another example of not placing any unnecessary 00:47:30.970 --> 00:47:33.370 syntactic burden on the reader. 00:47:33.370 --> 00:47:41.500 And finally, don't call a shovel a spade. 00:47:45.000 --> 00:47:47.680 There's a habit, probably instilled by well-meaning but 00:47:47.680 --> 00:47:49.500 misadvised high school teachers, that you shouldn't 00:47:49.500 --> 00:47:53.530 repeat words, and so people go to great lengths to use some 00:47:53.530 --> 00:47:54.830 different word. 00:47:54.830 --> 00:47:57.640 The problem is that the reader doesn't know if the shift in 00:47:57.640 --> 00:48:01.640 the word is deliberate and attached to some subtle 00:48:01.640 --> 00:48:05.320 meaning shift, or if it's just adhering to some high school 00:48:05.320 --> 00:48:08.720 teacher's admonition against using the same word again. 00:48:08.720 --> 00:48:12.540 So you don't want to say, oh, the right way to dig this 00:48:12.540 --> 00:48:15.230 particular hole is with a spade and then switch to a 00:48:15.230 --> 00:48:18.350 shovel because the reader can't tell if it's deliberate, 00:48:18.350 --> 00:48:21.840 accidental, or a consequence of just the desire not to use 00:48:21.840 --> 00:48:23.450 the same word. 00:48:23.450 --> 00:48:28.510 So this is how you, with some very simple mechanisms 00:48:28.510 --> 00:48:30.660 grounded in AI, you can actually make yourself into a 00:48:30.660 --> 00:48:33.280 better writer by avoiding those kinds of things that put 00:48:33.280 --> 00:48:35.700 an unnecessary syntactic burden on the people who are 00:48:35.700 --> 00:48:36.950 reading your stuff.