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Are you dancing around in your little garden of dreams, envisioning a world in which computers or robots understand every word you say — as you watch the pigs fly by, making note that you saw two Old Spots, a Hampshire, and a few more specimens that are not in the Audubon Field Guide to the Airborne Swine of North America?

Do you see that large shadow descending? That is the cold hard boot of reality. Yes, the same reality that proves one cannot run a program without running it.
You see, that understanding has an underbelly, which is approximately as sensitive as a one-ton lead block balanced upon a pin. For a computer to understand a sentence, first it must scan it from letters into words, throwing away all the spaces, and parse the words into an abstract syntax tree, which is a fancy name for something that you can’t draw in under a century, but that the computer understands well enough.

This work contains actual constructs of the underbelly of understanding. Firstly, there is a scanner that can understand the words underbelly and understanding (green); secondly, an LR parsing machine of the kind invented for us by that unparalleled genius, Prof. D. E. Knuth (red); thirdly, a parse table allowing a computer to parse multiples of a variable known as x (blue); fourthly, fifteen rules of logic providing instructions on how to throw away all the spaces (white).

Artist

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