George Hart

A Quote by George Hart on ability, language, order, possibility, simplicity, study, and thought

A little studied, but essential aspect of human natural-language production is the ability to form concise descriptive expressions. . . . A very simple model of sentence production involves two steps: first one has a thought, and then a sentence is chosen out of an infinite number of possibilities which expresses the thought. For example, a formal semantic model can be given in which the same "thought" (an expression in first-order predicate calculus) is expressed by the following four sentences: I see the big red thing I see the thing that both big and red It is the thing which is red and which is big I see What I here and now see is the thing which is big and not small and that is either round or not round and which has the property of being red.

George Hart

Source: Minimum Information Estimation of Structure, Ph.d., MIT, 1987

Contributed by: Zaady

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