Introducing Almound, applying classical studies to artificial intelligence .... no, really!

[almound]

Hi All!

My interest with Greek is a bit off-beat. Although I certainly appreciate classical studies and am actively pursuing investigation of (primarily) philosophical texts of classical Greece, mainly I am interested in Greek because of its application to artificial intelligence.

I am not an academician nor a classicist, and I have but a BS in mathematics. I have worked in the computer field at the corporate level for many years. (I am now retired.) My main interest is actually artificial intelligence, and I am keenly interested to present alternative directions by which progress in AI can proceed. I have long followed its path and I am not alone in being dissatisfied with its current trend. I am not so naive, though, as to think that it will just peter out because its pursuit lacks moral compass.

After having read many, many years in philosophy, it occurs to me that a great asset of Greek is the ability that it lends to authors to express themselves in such a fashion so as to differentiate between aspects of intelligent action; those aspects that require conscious facilitation, and those which do not. As such, Greek is the perfect venue through which to present myth. It is also well-suited to present the tissue of psychological complexities known as tragedy. In other words, Greek provides means (sometimes at the level of grammar, sometimes through semantics) by which to characterize an action as being representationally intentional, or else non-representationally intentional. The long and short of it is that intelligent action that does not require consciousness should be able to be produced artificially.

As such, in 2014, it became crucial that I quickly obtain some means by which to survey the whole of Greek and Latin literature starting with lexicons more advanced and comprehensive than that of the Liddell-Scott-Jones. So, I have needed to find out more about Greek in this regard, and in a hurry. I still do. I look forward to discussing this and other topics here.

To that end, I began to digitize the two 19th century editions of the Thesaurus Graecae Linguae of Henricus Stephanus (Henri Estienne), which was completed last year. You can view the results now for free by searching the Way Back Machine. (If you don't know what that is or where on the Internet it is, just ask. I don't want to infringe on the rules by giving links.) There are 22,000 pages of Greek and Latin lexicon available free of charge in these volumes. They are 99% correct text in the form of PDFs and TXT files. These are fully and quickly searchable through common tools like Adobe Reader, and/or by using a good text editor (such as UltraEdit). It is the first time this has ever been done, at least according to the professors that have communicated with me.

So far there are two 19th century multi-volume editions of Henri Estienne's "Thesaurus Graecae Linguae," that of Didot and that of Valpy. There is the 1740 edition of Robert Estienne's "Thesaurus linguae Latinae." And also Sandys' 3-volume "History of Classical Scholarship." All publications are full length, unedited, non-copyrighted, digitized in unicode, and almost completely accurate.

More posting is coming soon, along with cleaned-up, black-and-white, complete 16th century original editions for comparison. I have my sights on the Loeb Classical Library, and am close to being able to digitize its font. Currently, I am OCRing C. D. Yonge's English Greek Lexicon (1870), and Ramshorn's book of Latin Synonyms (trans. by Lieber). Please make suggestions for additional materials to digitize.

This introduction is incomplete, but should give you an idea as to why I want to participate in the forum. All the best,

Al

[bedwere]

Welcome to Textkit, Al!