From: "Jeffrey E." <[email protected]> To: Bob Berwick Subject: Re: Date: Sat, 05 Sep 2015 15:00:32 +0000 i will spend all the time you like teaching you about investing and the markets. simpler than it appears.. I would like chomsky to follow in the footsteps of hibert, turing , and encourage work in their fiels by presenting goals to the disciples. On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 10:03 AM, Bob Berwick < wrote: Hi Jeffrey, Ah very cool. So let me try a few out. I uess it partly (! of course!) depends on how much we get to stick into the box. fine with prize money, mostly because as you know from Marvin, there's no way to get funding for "real" problems like these or those that Marvin studies, nsf & darpa and toyota (as you just saw) only care about self-driving cars. So be overjoyed to get some way to fund new students.... Challenge 1. Discriminating language from noise. This is doable. Partha Niyogi nearly did it. A six-month effort. Challenge 2. Ah, depends on the sentences and what 'coherent' means. Does Noam mean `screwed up in some way'? We're not so far from that. Further than 1. That system I showed you that can isolate diffi factors in *syntax* as a small set of constraints can do some of that. Recall Shimon Ullman's `rigidity principle' about the interpretation of points moving in the visual field - same coherence idea. Challenges 3 and 4 are much harder, have to know more about 'meaning' and `inference'. I wouldn't be happy with statistical curve fitting here. Finally - though I will drop this, because your time is too valuable and the problems you and Noam pose are the important ones, to me — what was your estimate of how much that twitter-in-love entrepeneur would have lost if he did honestly follow his twitter-predictor during the first week of this month? I guess I am still baffled about the "market" for their product unless it's as you say, the market for the new, shiny toys - which is just about salesmanship, not scienc