[HN Gopher] PromptArray: A Prompting Language for Neural Text Ge...
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       PromptArray: A Prompting Language for Neural Text Generators
        
       Author : kelseyfrog
       Score  : 76 points
       Date   : 2023-01-09 04:52 UTC (18 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | quantum_mcts wrote:
       | I thought that would be a language for _sampling_ from the LM.
       | Why no one created one btw?
        
       | novaomnidev wrote:
       | Looks like spintax
        
       | politician wrote:
       | This is exactly the same sort of "wasted effort" that folks argue
       | against when discussing space exploration, lunar or Martian
       | colonization: It looks like an utter waste of people's time and
       | effort... until they succeed.
       | 
       | I wish folks trying to formalize prompt generation godspeed.
        
       | qsort wrote:
       | Dijkstra said that if we ever had the misfortune of having
       | machines programmable in natural language, sooner or later
       | someone would construct a formal language over it.
       | 
       | Playing out in real time. We're living legendary times.
        
         | dragonwriter wrote:
         | > Dijkstra said that if we ever had the misfortune of having
         | machines programmable in natural language
         | 
         | We have humans, and we spend a lot of time constructing formal
         | specialized languages for specifying instructions, expected
         | behavior, etc., for them (ironically, many of them, in the
         | history of computing, _specifically targeting_ the people whose
         | job is to program computers), so that 's... a pretty obvious
         | prediction.
        
           | qsort wrote:
           | From the abundance of people who are still after this
           | "programming in natural language" nonsense, it seems to me
           | like _repetita iuvant_.
        
         | rgbrgb wrote:
         | Love this idea, would like to read more. Got a source?
        
           | [deleted]
        
           | jxy wrote:
           | https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd06xx/EWD667.PDF
           | 
           | > From one gut feeling I derive much consolation: I suspect
           | that machines to be programmed in our native tongues--be it
           | Dutch, English, American, French, German, or Swahili--are as
           | damned difficult to make as they would be to use.
        
           | qsort wrote:
           | > It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have
           | happened if, right from the start our native tongue would
           | have been the only vehicle for the input into and the output
           | from our information processing equipment. My considered
           | guess is that history would, in a sense, have repeated
           | itself, and that computer science would consist mainly of the
           | indeed black art how to bootstrap from there to a
           | sufficiently well-defined formal system.
           | 
           | https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E.
           | ..
        
             | rgbrgb wrote:
             | thank you!
        
       | zitterbewegung wrote:
       | This is interesting and it would be neat if it was used with
       | GPTChat. On the other hand this should be benchmarked on multiple
       | interactions with GPTChat or just people that understand how to
       | write prompts in general. Having the computer do basically all
       | possible inputs into the generator could possibly be programmed
       | as a layer between the underlying Neural Text Generator.
        
       | dggma wrote:
       | This is really interesting. A friend of mine had a similar idea
       | for an intermediate language between natural language and SQL
       | that he'd let people build apps on top of. This was about 10
       | years ago so I thought it was a ridiculous notion but time proved
       | me wrong.
        
       | whoopdedo wrote:
       | Next step is training an AI to generate prompts.
        
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       (page generated 2023-01-09 23:02 UTC)