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Comment by salty_biscuits | Hacker News Reader

You can look at a medieval bestiary to see how people thought animals might look based on descriptions alone. Like these lovely elephants

https://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/20...

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Honestly, these are some of my favorite stories and I think more ML people need to learn more about mythology (I say this as a ML researcher btw). Because once you go down this path you start to understand how "Rino" == "Unicorn". You have to really think about how to explain things when you're working with a limited language. Yeah, we have the word "rino" now, but how would you describe one to someone who has no concept of this? Maybe a cow with one big horn? Is "like a big fat tough skin horse with a big horn coming out of its head" accurate? And then apply your classic game of telephone[0]. It is also how you get things like how in Chinese a giraffe is "long neck deer"[1] (that doesn't work for all things in Chinese and there's another game of telephone (lol, maybe I was too harsh on the British in [0]) and well... you can imagine things get warped like crazy).

There's so many rabbit holes to go down when trying to understand language, vision, reasoning, and all that stuff.

[0] (Jesus England... this is what you call this game?!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

[1] https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=zh-CN&text=giraffe&op... ----> https://translate.google.com/?sl=zh-CN&tl=en&text=%E9%95%BF%...

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