Let me preface this with "I know dick about AI (or lisp, or lojban, for that matter)."
There is a
moderately interesting wiki thread on how
lojban would improve AI's efforts. To me, it is a bit of a red herring. For those of you who haven't heard of lojban, here is the official line from the
faq:
What is lojban?
Lojban is a carefully constructed spoken, as well as written, language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication. It was made well-known by a Scientific American article and references in both science fiction and computer publications. Lojban has been built over five decades by dozens of workers and hundreds of supporters.
The reason I think it is a bit of a red herring is that lojban (man, I continually want to type 'logban') doesn't turn up the knob of AI, it turns down the knob of humans. Lojban, if it is successful in its effort to be logically self-consistent basically dumbs down human speech to only things which can be expressed unambiguously. The amazing power of the human mind is that it can deal with ambiguity. Creating a language that is easily parsable and then creating a program that can parse it doesn't constitute AI to me. That's like saying "I'm going to fly to the sun. Now, before I begin, the sun is large and firey, and man is it a long way away, so let me redefine the sun to be this soccer ball, which I will place conveniently next to me here..."
On a somewhat related note, I have been reading Paul Graham's On Lisp (get a free pdf copy online), and let me say that my head hurts. I love it. Love It. LOVE IT. I'll be buying a copy just so I'll have it ;)
My panel question for the xml dev conference, which I never submitted for reasons which I have previously disclosed, was going to be "Wouldn't it be better if we just started over in lisp? I mean, if we all focused, how long would it really take to catch up?"
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