This week
- Lecture
- 22 March 2027 The network, and the confident wrong answer
- Slides
- Open the deck
- Specimens
I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.
The Swansea road sign primary
Bench
- Material
- input with no content
- Operation
- probing a closed system
- Leaves
- a dated log of what a system invents
Today the room runs the experiment rather than reading the artefact.
The protocol
- Pick a language pair where one side has very little parallel text.
- Feed it input with no content: repeated syllables, a string of the same character, a word with a typo in the middle.
- Record every input, every output, the system, the direction, and the date. Screenshot the date.
- Repeat one input four times over the session and see whether the answer moves.
What to watch for
The interesting result is not a wrong translation. It is a well-formed sentence about a subject that was not in the input, arriving with no hedging and no error message.
Afterwards
Your log is a dated artefact about a system that will have changed by the time anyone reads it. That is why step 3 is in the protocol and not a suggestion. Six months from now the log is the only evidence that this behaviour existed.
The spec
What you bring to the session. Written so a reader can tell whether it has been met without asking you.
- you have a log of inputs and outputs with the system, direction and date recorded
- you can point at an output that is fluent and has no relationship to its input
- you have said what your log does not establish
Teaching team
- Aurel Marchetti — tutor
- Ines Barrantes — convenor