Stephen Wolfram

where there were these particular patterns of how you could argue things, so to speak.

And in the Middle Ages, part of education was you memorized the syllogisms.

I forget how many there were, but 15 of them or something.

And they all had names.

They all had mnemonics, like I think Barbara and Celerent were two of the mnemonics for the syllogisms.

And people would kind of, this is a valid argument because it follows the Barbara syllogism, so to speak.

And it took until 1830 with George Boole to get beyond that and see that there was a level of abstraction that was beyond this particular template of a sentence, so to speak.

And what's interesting there is, in a sense,

You know, ChatGPT is operating at the Aristotelian level.

It's essentially dealing with templates of sentences.

By the time you get to Boole and Boolean algebra and this idea of, you know, you can have arbitrary depth nested collections of ands and ors and nots, and you can resolve what they mean, that's the kind of thing, that's a computation story.

That's, you know, you've gone beyond the pure sort of templates of natural language to something which is an arbitrarily deep computation.

But the thing that I think we realized from chat GPT is Aristotle stopped too quickly.

And there was more that you could have lifted out of language as formal structures.

And I think there's, in a sense, we've captured some of that in some of what is in language.

There's a lot of kind of little calculi, little algebras of what you can say, what language talks about.

I mean, whether it's, I don't know, if you say...

I go from place A to place B, place B to place C, then I know I've gone from place A to place C. If A is a friend of B and B is a friend of C, it doesn't necessarily follow that A is a friend of C. If you go from place A to place B, place B to place C, it doesn't matter how you went.

Like logic, it doesn't matter whether you flew there, walked there, swam there, whatever.

This transitivity of where you go is still valid.