CTO Blog

In a moment of beautiful peaceful
quiet Saturday morning
to the experience enjoyable
with the latest shooting
performance google

We write chess programs that can beat even the best Master. We land computer-guided vehicles on Mars, and usually it works. We develop new games that contain an amazing level of sophistication and detail. How reassuring that we still can’t construct software that truly understands human language and is able to translate effectively from one language to the other.

Nevertheless, I consider the first paragraph nothing less than computer-generated art. Just write an ordinary sentence – in my case in my native language Dutch - and then let the renewed Google Translate have its way a few times, transforming from Dutch to English, from English to traditional Chinese and all the way back again. Sheer poetry is what you get.

Ray Kurzweil and Douglas Hofstadter firmly believe that computers sooner or later will be spiritual and will think and act like humans. Well, the language skills of the machine may still require some rework. Think I’ll stick to Roger Penrose: the soul is not a deterministic algorithm.

Neither is language, I might add.

A thinking computer will contain the Emperor’s New Mind and it will speak the Emperor’s New Language. Nice poems, though. Try creating some of your own and please share your Google Poetry with us.