PowerShell has its own alias, "gci" for get-childitem and just "childitem" would automagically work.
> "shell command names just get longer and longer."
This is another rarely mentioned problem with CLIs; computers get bigger, software gets more complex, people want it to do more, and that means any command needs more context disambiguation and more typing to narrow down the more degrees of freedom. GUIs and TUIs can bring up related things to try and help you out.
btw. what is the benefit of Louise learning the Ackermann function with successor arithmetics? Ok the successor notation is structurally simple enough to 'learn' ... what does 'learning it' mean and how is that practical or useful?
Oooh, I remember now. You are talking about that discussion we had a while ago. OK.
Yeah, so,"learning" in that context means you're given a bunch of atoms as examples and you learn a logic programs that entails those atoms. "Atoms" here in the logical sense, of atomic formulae (not in the Prolog sense, where "atoms" are constants).
Ultimately, a sound and complete inductive algorithm like the one in Louise, is capable of learning any program, given one or more example atoms it entails, but in practice some programs are harder to learn than others. This is more so if a program must essentially be executed before it can be learned. Which, for the Ackermann fucntion, is a bit of a problem, given it's very expensive. So "learning" can't be done in a PAC-Learning sense, of learning from randomly chosen examples, because then you end up with combinatorial explosion and fast. So this "learning" I show in the Ackermann example is more like teaching: I chose, manually, an example that I know is informative and that the learner can use to learn.
Btw, I like necromancing old converstations too :D
>> PowerShell has its own alias, "gci" for get-childitem and just "childitem" would automagically work.
Yeah, I totally keep forgetting those and just use the unix-like aliases.
>> btw. what is the benefit of Louise learning the Ackermann function with successor arithmetics? Ok the successor notation is structurally simple enough to 'learn' ... what does 'learning it' mean and how is that practical or useful?
Holy unexpected question, Batman! :D
The point is that it much simplifies notation, which in turn simplifies the background knowledge. The alternative is to give is/2 as background knowledge, but then you also need to somehow specify all the arithmetic functions it can use, so it doesn't make for a simple example anymore (although I don't think the data/examples/ackermann.pl example is simple, given the flattening; I really need to sit my bum down and write a flattening/unflattening program transformation).
An alternative, while still keeping things simple, is the way it's done in the data/examples/even_odd.pl example, where I just hard-code the prev/1 predicate. But if you do it that way, you then need to extend prev/1 after learning, or the whole learned program, along with the background knowledge, is incomplete (it works only for the numbers in the interval [1,4]).
Generally, those data/examples/ files are meant to be simple examples and I tried to simplify the notation. One could certainly do a better job than what I've done, I think. But they're not supposed to be very useful, they're demonstrations.
I might have some time this month and the next to improve as much as I can in the documentation and the examples. But real-world applications will have to wait. I might have something in the works. Wish me luck :)
> "shell command names just get longer and longer."
This is another rarely mentioned problem with CLIs; computers get bigger, software gets more complex, people want it to do more, and that means any command needs more context disambiguation and more typing to narrow down the more degrees of freedom. GUIs and TUIs can bring up related things to try and help you out.
btw. what is the benefit of Louise learning the Ackermann function with successor arithmetics? Ok the successor notation is structurally simple enough to 'learn' ... what does 'learning it' mean and how is that practical or useful?