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aiisnotthis

6 karma · joined October 18, 2020

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aiisnotthis··on Ask HN: Has anyone tried to use AI to generate an emergent programming language?
> suggesting the possibility of a polyglot or manticore language

This does not have to be true in order to translate languages.

But in the case of current programming languages, they all compile to the same standard instruction set architectures following the same basic laws of boolean logic, so it should not be surprising that PLs are translatable. Likely, the model has discovered some basic statistical representation of those things.

aiisnotthis··on Ask HN: Has anyone tried to use AI to generate an emergent programming language?
This seems to be displaying a common disconnect between the perceptions of "AI" and what modern AI actually is.

There is no "emergent" phenomenon currently in AI. I am thinking that the closest concept to what the author is asking for is a generative model, but even this does not really come close to performing tasks like "discovering" a new programming language. And it certainly would not discover an "emergent" anything. If it did "discover" anything it would be an object very statistically similar to the objects used to construct the model in the first place (e.g., deep fakes).

Everything in current AI is data first (read: data only). You can sometimes synthesize data and use that, but you always start with real-world data, and the models you end up with are parameterizations of the data you trained with. Always. So, while there is a future where a technical answer can be supplied to this question appropriately ... We are as of yet not in that future.

I consider this a technically valid answer and not a dismissal of the author's question, btw.