Language and AI
'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.'
This was composed by Noam Chomsky as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical.
But does it really not make any sense at all? Do colourless green ideas sleep furiously?
If you are beginning to look at the sentence from a different angle in the effort of making some sense out of it, isn't that because you have a 'free thinking circuit'? Do you think AI could ever develop such free-thinking ability in itself?
Certain types of poetry can be very confusing and are open to different interpretations. I love TS Eliot's The Waste Land, but I don't understand much of it. Being able to interpret poetry--or prose--from different angles is part of literature's beauty. Unlike math, different analyses can be correct whereas 2+2 always equals 4. On the other hand, a ballad such as Noye's "The Highwayman" tells a specific story and is not language of symbols.
I interpret "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" as frustration over not being able to express one's ideas coherently or not being able to manifest them in real life. The ideas are "green" as it is the color of fertility. I have felt like this when I have had what I deemed to be great ideas, but I could not/cannot express them adequately--so, they sleep, but the mind can still worry them like a dog worries a bone.
I programmed a computer to write poetry like that in 1969 (high school). I had the computer select words from lists in a sentence order using a random number generator. The program was written selecting commands from two thousand punch cards and then arranging them. These were submitted to the computer and the output collected...
Nothing has changed/advanced much, then. Input information - process it - output a computed result. No actual thinking.
'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.' could mean:
Insignificant young ideas remain dormant, yet desperately waiting to be noticed so as to become distinctive.
Translated by me. How's that? LOL!
not bad i looked it up, lol. it was about how a naive idea could be restless.