Joseph Hirsch's Blog - Posts Tagged "chess"
The Well at Morning, the Fountain at Twilight: Or, Why Even the Unemployed Might be about to Lose Their Livelihoods
There’s a new book I’ve been meaning to read called “AI Snakeoil,” whose central argument you can probably guess without needing the subtitle. Here that is, anyway, though:
“What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, Can’t Do, and How to Tell the Difference.”
Its authors, Arvin Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, aren’t the first to recognize that the “rise of the machines” narrative may have been oversold. There was a brilliant and accessible philosopher named Hubert Dreyfus who made the same arguments in various books, one of which I read, called “Mind Over Machine.”
Sidenote: Dreyfus served as the partial inspiration for Professor Hubert Farnsworth on Matt Groening’s “Futurama.” If you’re not familiar with the show, Farnsworth’s the bald, bespectacled man whose overbite marks him as one of Groening’s creations.
In his book, Dreyfus cites various reasons for his argument that consciousness, reasoning, and abstraction are different from the calculative processes of even the most “intelligent” AI. His arguments are fascinating and well-argued, but, having said that, one must always leave room for doubt.
And those in my field—translation—have lots of reasons to feel insecure about their futures. Hell, there’s good reason to worry right now. Most of the job offers out there are to train software which, once trained to sufficiency, will replace those who trained it.
Still, there may be hope, as translation is as much art as science, especially when dealing with literature. I have no doubt that AI can already match or even best me when it comes to translating legal documents or directions in a manual on how to assemble furniture. But literature seems more something spawned of the alchemy of our 100 trillion plus synapses than something readily produced by algorithm. Poetry even moreso relies on an abstraction that manages to even stymie the majority of human beings. Most people don’t read it, even most writers. For instance, when I asked a buddy of mine who writes potboilers his opinion of poetry, he threw up his hands and shouted, “It’s bullshit! Just say what you mean!”
Of course, that’s impossible because—to paraphrase George Saunders from his masterful “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain”— “Poetry is the need to say something outrunning our ability to do so.”
While Bukowski’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I’ve always loved this final line from one of his poems that sort of underlines what I’m talking about: “All sadness grinning into flow.”
What exactly does it mean? Hard to say and open to interpretation, but it seems to express how sadness and joy merge with each other and double back on themselves, intertwine to give us the bittersweet. In five words it says something (at least to me) otherwise unutterable.
There was a sample exchange of dialogue that Dreyfus used in his book that stymied the best AI of his time at MIT. It went something like this:
WOMAN: I WANT A DIVORCE.
MAN: WHO IS HE?
Notice that the part that your mind automatically inferred was supplied without your really straining toward it. AI—at least back then—could not find this missing piece, and didn’t understand this exchange pertained to infidelity without mentioning it. Naturally someone could program it to do so—and probably did to fix that loophole after Dreyfus pointed it out. But there is a difference between trying to train AI to think in this sense and teaching it when to use “en passant” in a game of chess. Chess, despite how inscrutable it appears to the neophyte, is mostly a matter of memorization. There’s a ton of variety that produced by those 204 squares, but it’s nothing compared to what is possible with the roughly 20,000 word vocabulary of your average person.
Returning to poetry, let’s perform a small experiment. I will take a stanza from my favorite poet, Georg Trakl and translate it from German to English on my own. I will then take that same stanza, in German, and place it in Google Translate to see what the machine makes of it. I’m aware that there are far superior methods of machine translation (and no doubt more coming) but this will work for our modest purposes here. Additionally, I will include a third professional translation from German to English of the stanza.
This will allow us to compare not only human to machine, but human to human, and two different humans to machine.
Lastly, before getting started, I should point out that Trakl’s poems, while compact and concise, are incredibly difficult to translate.
I chose Trakl’s work in college on the misbegotten assumption that because his works were shorter they would be easier. It turns out that the opposite in fact is true. Shorter works offer fewer guideposts for the translator, and guard their untranslatable secrets well. A long poem is to the translator like a slower, bigger bird to the quail hunter. It is an easier target, especially if it has a refrain that helps one establish a rhythm. Trakl’s poems are paratactical, staccato. They pop up, fly for a short time, then go to ground before you can even draw a bead on them.
This, however, makes Trakl ideal for this assignment. If ever a poet existed to trick a machine as well as the unwary meatbag / moist robot, it was him.
Let’s get started. Here is a stanza of Trakl’s, untranslated.
Die Junge Magd:
Oft am Brunnen, wenn es dämmert,
Sieht man sie verzaubert stehen
Wasser schöpfen, wenn es dämmert.
Eimer auf und niedergehen.
Here now is my translation of that stanza.
The Young Maiden:
Often at the fountain, whenever it’s twilight,
One sees her standing enchanted,
Ladling water in the twilight,
The buckets going up and down.
“Dämmern” is one of those curious verbs in German, and by curious I mean confusing. “Dämmern” can mean for morning to dawn but also for night to fall. Ricard Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung” has been literally translated as “Twilight of the Gods,” but refers to “Ragnarök” the great end times event in Norse mythology.
Why then, did I choose “twilight” instead of “dawn,” here? There was no antecedent which would lead me to go one way or the other. Then again, night tends to play a much larger part in Trakl’s poetry than daylight, and this ain’t my first rodeo. He is, as the Deutsch say, a bit of a “Nachtschwärmer.”
Moving on, here is the other human contribution, put up here merely for educative purposes, with full credit to Daniele Pantano:
The Young Maiden:
Often by the well at dusk,
You see her standing spellbound
Drawing water at dusk.
Buckets plunge up and down.
Here’s why Pantano gets the big bucks while I’m writing this on my blog at 2 am on a Monday morning. He preserves the rhymes from German to English, which is not always an easy task. Granted, he probably made more than one pass on his version, but it’s superior to mine at least in that regard.
He also selects the word “dusk” as opposed to “twilight” for whatever reason. Do the words have different connotations? I guess they do if they do for you. For me, though, the words produce similar images. I will say there are some things I prefer about my version to the official one. Pantano’s choice of “spellbound” makes this nameless maiden seem more hypnotized than magical. “Enchanted” leaves her some agency no matter what kind of spell she’s working under; in fact “enchanted” suggests that she possesses her own store of magic, rather than being yoked under someone else’s spell. The “bound” in “spellbound” makes the thralldom/shackling explicit.
Now, though, comes the scary part, as thus far we have only compared apples to apples, while now we compare apples to a silicon simulacrum of a shiny red Macintosh. Yes, without further ado, here is the machine translation. Copying and pasting this stanza in the Google Translate box, I can’t help but feeling a little afraid. Will poor Daniele Pantano end up sleeping under a bridge, having been usurped by the poetic equivalent of Deep Blue, the machine that spanked Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in chess?
Let’s find out.
The Young Maid:
Often at the well, when it's twilight,
One sees her standing enchanted
Drawing water when it's twilight.
Pails going up and down.
It’s curious that the machine chose “twilight” much as I had. It failed to preserve the rhyme between “bound” and “down” in the B and D lines, as well. Like Herr Pantano, the machine likes the verb “drawing,” while I’m somehow more comfortable with “ladling.”
Why, you ask?
I don’t need a reason, but if pressed for one, I would say that ladling has homier connotations. It is more gemütlich, as the Germans say, conjuring images of food, steaming soup scooped from a cauldron and splashed into wooden bowls for hungry children. It’s not just that, though. “Drawing” has the feel of utility about it. In the translation by the other human and the computer, the maiden’s at the well for prosaic reasons. She needs water (duh.) In mine, she’s idly killing time at a fountain, perhaps admiring her reflection as the bucket disturbs the water to send out rippling waves in mirrored shimmers.
You see, of course, another reason why I’m not a pro, why I’m maybe the one who deserves to be sitting under a bridge with a little cardboard sign...
The most important difference between my translation and those of the woman and the machine was staring me in the face from the very first line.
I had my maiden at a fountain, while theirs were at wells. How did I not lead with that obvious divergence between my version and theirs? Especially since the word “enchanted,” so close to “fountain,” would immediately suggest fairytale connotations, perhaps even hinting at the Fountain of Youth.
I’ll chalk it up to tiredness, though I’m sure you can supply less charitable speculations as to my negligence, oh notional and likely nonexistent reader.
“What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, Can’t Do, and How to Tell the Difference.”
Its authors, Arvin Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, aren’t the first to recognize that the “rise of the machines” narrative may have been oversold. There was a brilliant and accessible philosopher named Hubert Dreyfus who made the same arguments in various books, one of which I read, called “Mind Over Machine.”
Sidenote: Dreyfus served as the partial inspiration for Professor Hubert Farnsworth on Matt Groening’s “Futurama.” If you’re not familiar with the show, Farnsworth’s the bald, bespectacled man whose overbite marks him as one of Groening’s creations.
In his book, Dreyfus cites various reasons for his argument that consciousness, reasoning, and abstraction are different from the calculative processes of even the most “intelligent” AI. His arguments are fascinating and well-argued, but, having said that, one must always leave room for doubt.
And those in my field—translation—have lots of reasons to feel insecure about their futures. Hell, there’s good reason to worry right now. Most of the job offers out there are to train software which, once trained to sufficiency, will replace those who trained it.
Still, there may be hope, as translation is as much art as science, especially when dealing with literature. I have no doubt that AI can already match or even best me when it comes to translating legal documents or directions in a manual on how to assemble furniture. But literature seems more something spawned of the alchemy of our 100 trillion plus synapses than something readily produced by algorithm. Poetry even moreso relies on an abstraction that manages to even stymie the majority of human beings. Most people don’t read it, even most writers. For instance, when I asked a buddy of mine who writes potboilers his opinion of poetry, he threw up his hands and shouted, “It’s bullshit! Just say what you mean!”
Of course, that’s impossible because—to paraphrase George Saunders from his masterful “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain”— “Poetry is the need to say something outrunning our ability to do so.”
While Bukowski’s not everyone’s cup of tea, I’ve always loved this final line from one of his poems that sort of underlines what I’m talking about: “All sadness grinning into flow.”
What exactly does it mean? Hard to say and open to interpretation, but it seems to express how sadness and joy merge with each other and double back on themselves, intertwine to give us the bittersweet. In five words it says something (at least to me) otherwise unutterable.
There was a sample exchange of dialogue that Dreyfus used in his book that stymied the best AI of his time at MIT. It went something like this:
WOMAN: I WANT A DIVORCE.
MAN: WHO IS HE?
Notice that the part that your mind automatically inferred was supplied without your really straining toward it. AI—at least back then—could not find this missing piece, and didn’t understand this exchange pertained to infidelity without mentioning it. Naturally someone could program it to do so—and probably did to fix that loophole after Dreyfus pointed it out. But there is a difference between trying to train AI to think in this sense and teaching it when to use “en passant” in a game of chess. Chess, despite how inscrutable it appears to the neophyte, is mostly a matter of memorization. There’s a ton of variety that produced by those 204 squares, but it’s nothing compared to what is possible with the roughly 20,000 word vocabulary of your average person.
Returning to poetry, let’s perform a small experiment. I will take a stanza from my favorite poet, Georg Trakl and translate it from German to English on my own. I will then take that same stanza, in German, and place it in Google Translate to see what the machine makes of it. I’m aware that there are far superior methods of machine translation (and no doubt more coming) but this will work for our modest purposes here. Additionally, I will include a third professional translation from German to English of the stanza.
This will allow us to compare not only human to machine, but human to human, and two different humans to machine.
Lastly, before getting started, I should point out that Trakl’s poems, while compact and concise, are incredibly difficult to translate.
I chose Trakl’s work in college on the misbegotten assumption that because his works were shorter they would be easier. It turns out that the opposite in fact is true. Shorter works offer fewer guideposts for the translator, and guard their untranslatable secrets well. A long poem is to the translator like a slower, bigger bird to the quail hunter. It is an easier target, especially if it has a refrain that helps one establish a rhythm. Trakl’s poems are paratactical, staccato. They pop up, fly for a short time, then go to ground before you can even draw a bead on them.
This, however, makes Trakl ideal for this assignment. If ever a poet existed to trick a machine as well as the unwary meatbag / moist robot, it was him.
Let’s get started. Here is a stanza of Trakl’s, untranslated.
Die Junge Magd:
Oft am Brunnen, wenn es dämmert,
Sieht man sie verzaubert stehen
Wasser schöpfen, wenn es dämmert.
Eimer auf und niedergehen.
Here now is my translation of that stanza.
The Young Maiden:
Often at the fountain, whenever it’s twilight,
One sees her standing enchanted,
Ladling water in the twilight,
The buckets going up and down.
“Dämmern” is one of those curious verbs in German, and by curious I mean confusing. “Dämmern” can mean for morning to dawn but also for night to fall. Ricard Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung” has been literally translated as “Twilight of the Gods,” but refers to “Ragnarök” the great end times event in Norse mythology.
Why then, did I choose “twilight” instead of “dawn,” here? There was no antecedent which would lead me to go one way or the other. Then again, night tends to play a much larger part in Trakl’s poetry than daylight, and this ain’t my first rodeo. He is, as the Deutsch say, a bit of a “Nachtschwärmer.”
Moving on, here is the other human contribution, put up here merely for educative purposes, with full credit to Daniele Pantano:
The Young Maiden:
Often by the well at dusk,
You see her standing spellbound
Drawing water at dusk.
Buckets plunge up and down.
Here’s why Pantano gets the big bucks while I’m writing this on my blog at 2 am on a Monday morning. He preserves the rhymes from German to English, which is not always an easy task. Granted, he probably made more than one pass on his version, but it’s superior to mine at least in that regard.
He also selects the word “dusk” as opposed to “twilight” for whatever reason. Do the words have different connotations? I guess they do if they do for you. For me, though, the words produce similar images. I will say there are some things I prefer about my version to the official one. Pantano’s choice of “spellbound” makes this nameless maiden seem more hypnotized than magical. “Enchanted” leaves her some agency no matter what kind of spell she’s working under; in fact “enchanted” suggests that she possesses her own store of magic, rather than being yoked under someone else’s spell. The “bound” in “spellbound” makes the thralldom/shackling explicit.
Now, though, comes the scary part, as thus far we have only compared apples to apples, while now we compare apples to a silicon simulacrum of a shiny red Macintosh. Yes, without further ado, here is the machine translation. Copying and pasting this stanza in the Google Translate box, I can’t help but feeling a little afraid. Will poor Daniele Pantano end up sleeping under a bridge, having been usurped by the poetic equivalent of Deep Blue, the machine that spanked Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in chess?
Let’s find out.
The Young Maid:
Often at the well, when it's twilight,
One sees her standing enchanted
Drawing water when it's twilight.
Pails going up and down.
It’s curious that the machine chose “twilight” much as I had. It failed to preserve the rhyme between “bound” and “down” in the B and D lines, as well. Like Herr Pantano, the machine likes the verb “drawing,” while I’m somehow more comfortable with “ladling.”
Why, you ask?
I don’t need a reason, but if pressed for one, I would say that ladling has homier connotations. It is more gemütlich, as the Germans say, conjuring images of food, steaming soup scooped from a cauldron and splashed into wooden bowls for hungry children. It’s not just that, though. “Drawing” has the feel of utility about it. In the translation by the other human and the computer, the maiden’s at the well for prosaic reasons. She needs water (duh.) In mine, she’s idly killing time at a fountain, perhaps admiring her reflection as the bucket disturbs the water to send out rippling waves in mirrored shimmers.
You see, of course, another reason why I’m not a pro, why I’m maybe the one who deserves to be sitting under a bridge with a little cardboard sign...
The most important difference between my translation and those of the woman and the machine was staring me in the face from the very first line.
I had my maiden at a fountain, while theirs were at wells. How did I not lead with that obvious divergence between my version and theirs? Especially since the word “enchanted,” so close to “fountain,” would immediately suggest fairytale connotations, perhaps even hinting at the Fountain of Youth.
I’ll chalk it up to tiredness, though I’m sure you can supply less charitable speculations as to my negligence, oh notional and likely nonexistent reader.
