At 7:53 PM +0800 2/15/08, Rob Freeman wrote:
>OK, John.
>
>Replace that use with "ambiguous" for now, then. I think that works.
>
>Personally I thought Sean Barker's sense for "random" from signal
>processing theory was very relevant (Axiom. ont. Feb 12):
>
>"Radar signal processing <B>theory</B> treats signals and noise as
>being random, but with different probability distributions."
>
>The natural language of which the Web chiefly consists behaves in
>exactly this way. (01)
?? can you explain what you mean and why you
think its true? Are you saying that NL consists
of a signal plus probabilistic noise? Its hard
for me to get my head around this idea. Can you
give any examples? (02)
>
>Or the sense, also noted by Sean, in which you can search the Web for
>a name and find a wide range of people. (03)
?? What has that got to do with signal processing? (04)
>
>But perhaps ambiguous can serve as well with both of these senses for
>most purposes. (05)
That doesn't seem right, either. "Ambiguous"
means having more than one possible meaning, or
having an indeterminate meaning. This hasn't got
anything to do with compression, however. So for
example the noun phrases "Patrick John Hayes" and
"The senior scientist at the Florida Institute
for Human and Machine Cognition" are both
UNambiguous and both refer to me, but the second
takes lot more characters to do it with. (06)
Pat (07)
>
>-Rob
>
>On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 12:47 PM, John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Rob,
>>
>> Although I agree with some of the points you're trying to make,
>> you could make your case more convincing if you would avoid
>> making statements that are blatantly false if the words are
>> interpreted in their normal senses.
>>
>> In the following passage, I suggest that you avoid the word
>> 'random' or 'randomness':
>>
>>
>> > To try and be a little concrete for a minute, what this means
>> > in terms of the Web is that the Web itself (by virtue of its
>> > randomness) is the most compact representation of the knowledge
>> > it contains.
>>
>> The web may be large and complex, but it is definitely *not* random
>> in any sense; almost every page on the web can be compacted by a
>> large fraction; and the entire web contains an enormous amount of
>> duplication that would permit great compaction if anybody wanted
>> to spend the time and money to do so.
>>
>> To demonstrate that point, download a typical web page and try
>> compacting it using any compression program on your computer
>> (ZIP, although not great, is usually available).
>>
>> If you're using Windows, you can also open any zipped directory,
>> use the details view, and note the percentage compression of each
>> file. A text file is typically compressed to less than a third of
>> its original size, but diagrams are usually compressed much less
>> because most of them have already been compressed.
>>
>> John
>
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