1 Age-otori (Japanese): To look worse after a haircut

2 Arigata-meiwaku (Japanese): An act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favor, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude

"Practical Foundations for Programming Languages" #plt #proglang #language #design

Ulam parried, "What makes you so sure that mathematical logic corresponds to the way we think? Logic formalizes only a very few of the processes by which we actually think. The time has come to enrich formal logic by adding to it some other fundamental notions. What is it that you see when you see? You see an object as a key, a man in a car as a passenger, some sheets of paper as a book. It is the word 'as' that must be mathematically formalized.... Until you do that, you will not get very far with your AI problem."

To Rota's expression of fear that the challenge of formalizing the process of seeing a given thing as another thing was impossibly difficult, Ulam said, "Do not lose your faith--a mighty fortress is our mathematics," a droll but ingenious reply in which Ulam practices what he is preaching by seeing mathematics itself as a fortress!

If anyone else but Stanislaw Ulam had made the claim that the key to understanding intelligence is the mathematical formalization of the ability to "see as," I would have objected strenuously. But knowing how broad and fluid Ulam's conception of mathematics was, I think he would have been able to see the Letter Spirit architecture and its predecessor projects as mathematical formalizations.