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What I Have Learned about Language from the Playing Card World
Human language communication is complex but not mysterious; it does not require general intelligence
- The Playing Card World — a shared perceptual and conversational space
The Playing Card World I have been working with for a long time is a deceptively simple environment that involves two conversational partners, one me and the other a computer program, who share a perceptual space containing playing cards and piles of playing cards that we can each directly manipulate and converse about.
Despite its apparent simplicity, it illuminates many aspects of how our human languages and cognition work, and how computer programs can be designed to emulate them.
There are no philosophical mysteries involved, just many interesting problems of detail to be solved about attention and memory.
2. Starting with a few basic concepts and words for them
As we experience as children in our much more complicated lives, each of the agents in a Playing Card World starts with some fundamental concepts of things and events, including names (words or phrases) for some of the fundamental things and events. It is important to realize that words are also nameable things, and utterances of words and sequences of words are events.
