I haven’t been able to write in a long while, but Scorpio has been making progress. For those who came in late, please refer to my earlier posts on my efforts to teaching language to an AI. They can be accessed here.

The most recent outputs are updated here. Do check them for your curiosity.

While the interim results in Hitches on the way have been put just for tracking progress, the results listed in Getting there are much more worthy of attention.

I would like to examine and critique the latter from a linguistic point of view. One of the first things to note is the lofty sentence construction. Ms. Rand preferred bulky and complex sentences instead of short and disjointed ones, which went a long way to contribute to her preaching and visionary tone. The use of periods is limited and adjective usage is high.

Also immediately noticeable is the use of adjectives and imagery. In the limited places where Scorpio’s writings are almost coherent, the picture is well painted and described.

“They knew, as if they had been completely standing and motion.”

Slipped up in the last bit, could either be “in motion” for duality or “motionless” for complementing “standing”.

Finally, every reader would notice the use of figurative speech. I was almost laughing when I read

“What is it the man who doesn’t want your own field.”

A little risky sentence construction, but can be argued to have a meaning. However, what follows is astounding

“Miss Taggart,” said Galt and turned to his static from the day where an impersonal confidence had not seen on the valley.

Make it “been seen” and this would be exactly how Ms. Rand would have written John Galt to say and do. I would like to re-iterate, Scorpio is learning language at a character level. That means, it has had to learn the right sequence of characters to form “Galt”, and then the right sequence of characters to formulate the sentence to describe what he would have said and to whom, while doing what. The scale of it all is truly daunting.

“No,” he said, “if he seems to see some specific and the contradiction will be able to see the choice of his feelings.”

This caused me to laugh out loud. If I correct this a little to-

“No,” he said, “if he seems to see something specific, the contradiction will be able to see the choice of his feelings.”

it becomes something that would feature as a quote on the description of the novel.

As I write this, Scorpio is still re-reading the novel and spouting excerpts. At the moment, I have set the settings to “low risk” where Scorpio sticks to the source material as much as possible, because it was reverting back to gibberish at the higher risk levels. But for me, Scorpio will be ready when it reaches the point where the writings at the high risk would be as spell-binding as the quotes in the end.