Which ?-gram indicates that "tutting" is "making a clicking sound"? It all depends on what one's purpose is in their writing. Writing can be to: inform suggest explain ridicule inquire impress blame embarrass obscure and many other reasons. Using obscure, obsolete, vague or misleading wording suggests that the writer is perhaps unwilling to be understood by everyone. Often it is necessary for the reader to make some judgement as to what the writer means, as there are few clues to go on, or perhaps contradictory thoughts are expressed. When it comes to art, be it painting or some form of writing (including music/songs), it is often left to the viewer or reader to decide for him/her self. Artists are known to say something like, "If I have to explaine it to you, you wouldn't understand it."

For what it's worth, the given usage of "tutting" and "strutting" are incorrect. "Tut" is a word that dictionary.com defines as: tut    [pronounced as an alveolar click; spelling pron. tuht] interjection, noun, verb, tut·ted, tut·ting. interjection 1. (used as an exclamation of contempt, disdain, impatience,etc.) 2. for shame! noun 3. an exclamation of “tut.” ================ Hence, the phrase "tutting my heel" has no literal meaning in English, because "tut" is an example of onomatopeia: Onomatopoeia (also spelled onomatopœia , from Greek: ονοματοποιΐα) is a word or a grouping of words that imitates the sound it is describing, suggesting its source object, such as"click", "bunk", "clang", "buzz", "bang", or animal noises such as"oink", "moo", or "meow". The word is a synthesis of the Greek words όνομα (onoma, = "name") and ποιέω (poieō, = "I make" or "Icreate") thus it essentially means "name creation", although itmakes more sense combining "name" and "I do", meaning it isnamed (and spelled) as it sounds (e.g. quack, bang, etc.). Onomatopoeic words differ across languages because they always have to conform to some extent to the broader linguistic system they are part of. Thus the Norwegian tikk takk for the sound of a clock could never be a Dutch word because Dutch words never have long consonants at the end of the word; accordingly, the Dutch equivalent is tik tak . ============= Similarly, "strutting my feet" is technically wrong since "my feet" is redundant; "strutting" already means "moving my feet pompously." What this all boils down to is something I mentioned previously, namely that poetry, song lyrics and sometimes prose do not necessarily adhere to the letter of English conventions. Poetry and lyrics rely on such things as meter and rhyme at the expense of the normally accepted and defined rules of word order and association. For these reasons, I firmly believe that n-grams do not and cannot "define" words. They can only provide what has already been written that includes the given words. The "meaning" of a particular word must begin with it accepted dictionary meaning. From there its meaning in a particular context might be inferred. But even this inference is not guaranteed, because all human languages contain idioms, which are words used together to mean something often unrelated to the accepted meaning of the words involved. In English we can say, "He was hot under the collar", which means he was angry. Or, "She was spitting tacks", mean

You haven't commented on my "interpretation". Any ideas why your n-gram process failed with "tutting"? What about "stutting"?

"I've been walking in the same way as I did And missing out the cracks in the pavement And tutting my heel and strutting my feet." Well, when it comes to songs and poetry, it's pretty much a matter of "it means what you think it means." Same with art. My guess: "I've been walking as I always have And avoiding the cracks in the pavement And clicking my heel and walking pompously." My best wishes for your success.

"5 to 10 billion word1-word2-word3-word4 quadruples, the rest orders likewise." What happens if a given phrase is or is not found? Do these word1-2-3-4 quads exhaust the English language? What do you mean by "the rest orders likewise"? It still remains that the human brain will out-perform silicon at this point in technology, at least. My belief is that we're missing something, some key understanding or technology. This is not to say that it won't materialize someday. Willie said it best: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dealt with in your philosophy, Horatio." What we need is some new philosophy!

Well, we are a very long way from the HAL computer of "2001", that's for sure. There are several components to the problem of computer "intelligence". The first problem is one of storage capacity. The human brain is made up of about one trillion neurons. Each neuron is linked with from 10 to 10,000 other neurons. The number of pathways is in the vicinity of 10 to the 100th power. That's ten followed by 100 zeros, a might huge number! It exceeds the estimated number of particles in the entire universe! The brain stores everything in this massive network of neurons in the form of nerve impulses that traverse one or more of these pathways. On top of that, the individual circulating thoughts (or memories, or whatever) are also connected by other pathways of circulating nerve impulses. In computer terms, the brain is an organic associative memory. Add to the above the existence of emotions, images, sounds, smells, and all of the other senses, all of which are remembered in the same way. Thus, when you hear the word "rose" your thoughts instantly conjure up an image of a rose, it's smell, the fact that the plant has thorns, a memory of the time you gave your mother a rose and whe hugged you, perhaps of a girl to whom you gave a rose and she kissed you. All of this happens in a flash, filling your consciousness with great feelings. So the question is, how do we accomplish this with "artificial intelligence"? It beats me! Animals are no different. They possess memories and emotions, even love, strange as that might seem. When I was in high school, I kept an aquarium. One of my favorite fish was a male beta "fighting" fish. (The only thing it will fight with is another male beta.) We used to catch flies and toss them into the tank, whereupon the beta would swim over and gulp it down. During the winter, small amounts of ground meat replaced the flies. After a while of doing this, the beta would swim over to the side of the tank whenever I approached. He would accept dead flies or ground me from my fingers, and even let me gently stroke his sides. But only for me. My parents would not receive the same acceptance. I believe that silly fish loved me! I think that the key lies in what we call experience. As we mature, we undergo the slow implanting of our conglomerate memories and associations. In order to produce a HAL, it would have to undergo a "growing up" process. And there are so many variables that it staggers the mind, and surely would tax the brains of several billions of pro

Much of my professional software design/implementation career was filled with the necessity to milk the last smidgen of performance out of some code. The environment was based on DEC PDP-10 processors (KL series) in a commercial time-sharing setting (CompuServe). For the most part, we used a language called BLISS, which was truly a magnificent implementation language. Its optimizer produced code that was probably 99% as good as I could do by "hand". This, coupled with something I've not seen elsewhere in a programming language, lexical processing, was the foundation of a great deal of CompuServe's CIS software. One of my areas involved the error-correcting protocols used for file upload/download. The most used protocol, B Plus, was the cornerstone of what was called HMI, Host Micro Interface. This protocol performed so well that it earned me the "honor" of frequent verbal battles with the OS developers because a B Plus data transfer would hit the "sweet spot" in performnce. This means that by the time a packet was finished being transmitted, the acknowledgement of the previous packet would already be waiting, and several packets could usually be sent in one time-slice. Fun stuff! Natural language processing is something I often pondered, with no real break throughs. I always believed that a different kind of memory access was needed, something akin to the current CPU chips (Pentium) with their cache memory. The cache is a marvel of design. If that technology was to be extended to what I term "content addressable memory", where say a word fetches data by using the actual numeric letter value is the "address" presented to be found. But this is only a beginning of the processing utilized by the human brain. I think that neural network programming might open the door to fast cognitive processing, but we're a loooong way from anything practical along these lines. Way back, the trio of Newel, Simon and Shaw were among the first to contemplate what they termed "Information Processing". One of them said, "The problem with trying to teach a computer to understand natural language is that so few of we humans understand it to begin with." After fifty some years, the situation really hasn't progressed all that much.

"I defined a variable as a register and guess what despite the desperate need of this C has had other agenda - I mean C is good Assembly is best." Well, ideally C ought to be kept distinct from processor specific features. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in my first post, such have been part and parcel of the language since its original specification. Or soon after. In fact, I for one would love to see the ++x/--x et al removed from the language, as they ARE based on the capabilities of the PDP-11. That aside, I have ported C to the 6502, 6800, and even the PDP-10 processors, retaining various portions of the language as were feasible on a particular CPU. They worked very well. Yes, I had to rely on assembly code for the "down and dirty" things. But not all CPUs have addressable registers, which would make such a capability in C a tad awkward, to say the least. To quote the Bible (sort of): "Render unto the assembler that which is the assembler's."

"... but they failed [well partially they succeeded] to achieve this nifty goal." In what way did they fail to achieve that goal? More of the history is that Bell Labs developed an operating system for the PDP-7 (for what there was none previously). After they got C running on the PDP-11, they used C to write a translator from BPL (ie, their compiler for the PDP-7). Using that BPL -> C translator, they ported their operating system onto the PDP-11. Of course they had to write assembly code to handle the various low-level drivers. It was that port of their PDP-7 operating system that grew into UNIX(TM). By the way, "UNIX" means "UNIversal eXecutive" according to the Bell Labs guy I talked to. Also witness the various ports of UNIX to a plethora of platforms, all using (as far as I know) some manifestation of C. For example, LINUX and BSD.

It's interesting that you mention "assembly". The very history of C as a programming language speaks loudly. Long ago and long ago (as the Native Americans would say), Bell Laboratories purchased a DEC PDP-7 computer. That machine was quite primitive, more or less a "minimal" computer. It had either 4k or 8k memory of 18 bit words, 16 op-codes, no multiply or divide instructions, no index registers, and primitive indirect addressing. It did have a set of memory locations that were "auto-increment" that simulated very primitive index registers, but were not terribly useful over all. The principle I/O were paper tape and a model 33 teletype. In fact, a bare-bones PDP-7 only had a teletype, in which case it would have been a model 35 ASR, which had paper tape read and write included. VERY slow! Bell Labs wrote a language called BPL (for Bell Programming Language, I think) which they used as an alternative to the assembly language supplied by DEC. I've never seen any details on BPL. However, Bell Labs used BPL to write a FORTRAN compiler for the PDP-7, as odd at that might sound. When DEC came out with the PDP-11, Bell Labs bought one and jumped on it like a duck on a June bug! They wrote a translator that converted the BPL translator (probably other programs as well) to run on the PDP-11. Using the translated BPL, they developed a new language, C. From rags to riches in terms of machine language capability, the C designers included features in the language to utilize many of the newly available features of the PDP-11. In particular, the auto-increment/decrement and to-memory instruction modifiers were incorporated in the ++/--/+=/-= operators. The indirection modifiers gave rise to the pointer operators. The above information I learned from a Bell Labs programmer/developer at at DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer User's Society) meeting. He was one of the original creators of C, but unfortunately I forget his name. He told me that when they developed C, they had in mind a "portable assembler" that would allow them to port code to any architecture by merely writing a translator for C for that new machine. Good C programmers, he said, visualized assembly code as they wrote in C. For anyone interested, here is a link to the PDP-11 "card": [^] Given the .NET availability these days, it ma

I couldn't find my welder's glasses. I don't believe they would have helped very much, though. Instead, I used a piece of 1/8" aluminum sheet. Darn thing got so hot I couldn't hold it! Had to pull the plug to shut off the computer!~ I will say one thing about that page: It is at least readable. So many are equally gaudy but not readable by most mortals. The worst sites (and software) that use their own colors mixed with Windows System Colors. They will use something like "Button Color" for text on their own White background. I use a variant of High Contrast Black in which the Button Color is Yellow. Can you read Yellow text on White? I have often thought that the "page background color" (or image) ought to be stricken from the web HTML repertoire. In particular the capability of being able to use something that is part of that background as a "clickable" area. So many sites use this ancient scheme, and if you tune your browser to ignore background colors/images, you can't see where to click. Similarly, I believe that being able to specify Windows colors mixed with hard-coded colors is so problematical as to make life miserable for about 30% of the population who use some special Windows color scheme that aids them. My ophthalmologist teaches at a local university. He is considering assigning a project to study the effect of "bright background - dark text" color schemes in relation to eye problems, including the possibility that some problems might be CAUSED by excessive use of such bright themes.

RussCA