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<div dir="ltr"><span style="caret-color:rgb(33, 33, 33);color:rgb(33, 33, 33)">Dear Jose, Gary, and and Geoff</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr"><span style="caret-color:rgb(33, 33, 33);color:rgb(33, 33, 33)"> Since</span><span style="caret-color:rgb(33, 33, 33);color:rgb(33, 33, 33);display:inline !important"> the publication of "the handbook of brain theory and neural networks" in 2003,
I have focused on language origins and architecture and have not kept track of either the theory or practice of the recent explosive developments in AI.</span>
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<span style="caret-color:rgb(33, 33, 33);color:rgb(33, 33, 33);display:inline !important">Nonetheless, I would like to rise to Gary’s challenge offered by the cartoon shown below, and suggest</span><span style="font-size: inherit; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33); color: rgb(33, 33, 33);"> that
understanding it is within, or nearly within, the power of current AI.</span>
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<span style="caret-color:rgb(33, 33, 33);color:rgb(33, 33, 33);display:inline !important">First, an observation: I assert (without any empirical data other than a survey of ten friends) that the vast majority of English-speaking humans would fail to see the
humor in this cartoon. They would not have heard of Schrodinger‘s cat and, if asked to define quantum mechanics, might reply with the question "someone who fixes condoms?“ [Apologies. That was Apple's transcription of my spoken <span style="caret-color:rgb(33, 33, 33);background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);display:inline !important">"someone
who fixes<span class="Apple-converted-space"> quantums?"</span></span></span>
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<span style="caret-color:rgb(33, 33, 33);color:rgb(33, 33, 33);display:inline !important">However, it requires just three AI systems to recognize the joke:</span></div>
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<li style="font-size:inherit"><span><span style="caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33); color: rgb(33, 33, 33); font-size: inherit;">Triggered by recognizing this is a cartoon: A system that employs a theory of humor – perhaps as simple as the bi-association of Arthur
Koestler's "the act of creation" - to recognize that a joke is the bringing together of two different frames into collision. A similar system could operate within language at the level of puns, but here we need two separate systems: </span></span></li><li style="font-size:inherit"><span style="font-size: inherit; caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33); color: rgb(33, 33, 33);">A language recognition system that could parse the caption and use the words Schrodinger and cat to retrieve the Wikipedia article and summarize
it as "a thought experiment by Schrodinger to demonstrate the role of the observer in quantum mechanics in which a cat in a box is neither dead nor alive, but will become one of these when the box is opened."</span></li><li style="font-size:inherit"><span style="caret-color: rgb(33, 33, 33); color: rgb(33, 33, 33); font-size: inherit;">A vision system that will recognize the picture as being a scene set in a veterinary office. The language system can then interpret good news
and bad news in context.</span></li></ol>
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<div dir="ltr"><span style="caret-color:rgb(33, 33, 33);color:rgb(33, 33, 33);display:inline !important">Between them the three systems will rapidly recognize the joke that a cat-owning Mr. Schrodinger in a veterinary office is receiving an opinion that ties
in with the thought experiment of the physicist Schrodinger.</span>
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<span style="caret-color:rgb(33, 33, 33);color:rgb(33, 33, 33);display:inline !important">Whether or not the AI system would be amused is a separate question.</span><br style="caret-color:rgb(33, 33, 33);color:rgb(33, 33, 33)">
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 6/9/22 4:33 PM, Gary Marcus wrote:<br>
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<div dir="ltr"><span style="font-size: inherit;">... How general is the ability? Is it a handful of paraphrases of jokes in vast memorized database? Would it extend to other kinds of jokes? Could it (or related models like Gato, with visual input) explain this
cartoon?</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr"><img alt="image1.jpeg" src="cid:part1.08EE7344.CE7F849F@rutgers.edu" class=""></div>
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