Renatius Cartesius is no longer with us, but today we plan to use one of his ideas to prove that artificial intelligence is alive and well in a machine. We have recently expanded the heretofore primitive flag-panel of associative tags in the Mens Latina Strong AI to a state of maturity where the AI Mind has the power to think with a full panoply of five declensional case-endings. For you officers, a panoply is an ancient Greek word formed from “pan” meaning “all” and “hopla” meaning “weapons”. Therefore the “pan-hopla” or “panoply” of inflectional endings on Latin nouns and adjectives gives the AI the ability, when in Rome, to think like the Romans do.
All roads lead to Rome, and we are going to use our Cartesian coordinates to get there. In Latin they often repeat the meme that “Non uno die facta est Roma” or “Rome was not built in a day”, although I once saw a New Yorker-style cartoon in which a construction manager unfurls the blueprint for Rome and says to his assistant, “Well, I guess we could throw it up in about a day.” Likewise the Mens Latina, which is now arguably for one brief moment the most powerful concept-based AI in the world, was not built in a day. In fact, on the twelfth day of Latin mind-making we tried but failed to implement the Cartesian idea of “Cogito ergo sum” or “I think, therefore I am.” Our Latin AI Mind was too primitive to link the two ideas, which are equivalent to saying, “I am, because I think.” Our re-formulation of the mid-AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) software includes not only points of departure for the five main noun-cases in Latin (or Russian), but also conceptual flag-panel tags for adjectives, adverbs and conjunctions. We will treat the word “ergo” (“therefore”) as a conjunction joining the two ideas of “I think” and “I am”, or “I exist”.
In our newly Cartesian software, when a verb like “I think” is retrieved from memory to express an idea, we will have the VerbPhrase module not only fetch the verb from conceptual memory but also check the conceptual verb-engram for any addition attachments such as an adverb or a conjunction. Now let us go into the JavaScript AI code and tweak the handling of verb-concepts. Oh, first we must modify the storage of the Cartesian idea in the Latin mindboot sequence. We do so, and then we go into the VerbPhrase module where a verb is being selected and we install code that checks for a non-sero, positive value on the tcj time-of-conjunction tag, which we load with any positive value so that the AI Mind will be able to fetch and think the conjunction. We then have to decide at which point in thought-generation the AI will state the conjunction and its conjoined idea. Let us try the Latin-thinking LaThink module. First we insert a test for a positive tcj flag with an alert-box that lets us know that the flag is indeed holding a value. Then we insert code to call the ConJoin module to state the conjunction and the Indicative module to state the conjoined idea. We run the AI. It says “EGO COGITO EGO INTELLIGO TE”—not what we want. So we go into the ConJoin module and we insert code to check for a positive tcj value and speak the conjunction, but the rather stupid, albeit most advanced *NLU AI in the world says “EGO COGITO ERGO EGO INTELLIGO TE” (“I think therefore I understand you”). The output is wrong because it is simply stating the next emerging idea and not the Cartesian punch-line. After much tweaking, we get “EGO COGITO SUM EGO INTELLIGO TE”—still not satisfactory. So we go away for a while, drink coffee, read the New York Times, and then we start coding again. Finally we get the AI to say “EGO COGITO ERGO EGO SUM”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum
http://ai.neocities.org/Abracadabra.html—Mens Latina
http://ai.neocities.org/AILA.html—“Latin AI 101”