Re: Language in the meat machine

Darin Sunley (rsunley@escape.ca)
Fri, 16 Jul 1999 14:11:00 -0500

hal@finney.org wrote:

> This has an obvious flaw. The professor is checking for style, syntax,
> and logic. If students know that this program is going to check their
> papers, all they need to do is to write something that produces the
> right words in roughly the right positions, without regard to sentence
> structure.

Apparently they've tried this. They said most "travesties" failed because the mix of "apparently unrelated" but actually important words (prepositions, linkers, grammatical elements) was off. The programmer speculated that to generate a good set of keywords, you seem to have to write a full proper essay.

Darin Sunley
rsunley@escape.ca