[Attempto] AceWiki entry [...]

[Tobias Kuhn]

Hi George,

Agreed. Together with "and nothing else", phrases of the form "0 or more 
..." or "at least 0 ..." would make sense logically.

ACE does not support "and nothing else" but your example could be 
expressed in ACE like this:

"Everything that is contained by a sentence is a punctation-mark or is a 
noun or is a verb or is an other-part-of-speech."

This does not yet imply that at least one punctation mark has to be 
present. So you need another sentence for this:

"Every sentence contains at least 1 punctation-mark."


Cheers,
Tobias


On 01/16/2010 07:15 PM, George Herson wrote:
> hi,
>
> As i attempted to show with "The world is all creation, at least 0 Creators, and nothing else", the "0 or more" concept is useful as a constraint in a statement that includes "and nothing else."
>
> Another example:
>
> 1. All proper sentences contain 1 or more punctuation marks, nouns, verbs, 0 or more of the other parts of speech, and nothing else.
>
> That has more logically useful information than
>
> 2. All proper sentences contain 1 or more punctuation marks, nouns and verbs.
>
> Proof:  If you ask a reasoner
>
> 3. Is 'My kbjjn is killing me.' a proper sentence?
>
> it can only answer "no" if it knows 1).  Knowing 2) only will not allow it to make that deduction.
>
> Re: last 3 paragraphs below, no, i need "instance of a value" because a key column in a relational db is one that allows only unique values.
>
> thank you,
> George
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Tobias Kuhn<t.kuhn at gmx.ch>
> To: George Herson<gherson at snet.net>
> Cc: "attempto at lists.ifi.uzh.ch"<attempto at lists.ifi.uzh.ch>
> Sent: Tue, December 22, 2009 3:49:00 AM
> Subject: Re: [Attempto] AceWiki entry [...]
>
>>>> How do we specify an optional item, e.g., "Every sentence contains at
>>>> least 0 adverbs"?  Entering 0 after "at least" wasn't an option:
>>>> the function list starts at 1.
>>>
>>> Right. That's not possible at the moment. In terms of logic, a sentence like "every
>>> sentence contains at least 0 adverbs" does not make much sense, because it is always
>>> true. You could replace "adverbs" by "elephants", and the sentence would logically still
>>> be true.
>>>
>>> We are nevertheless considering adding "0" to the ACE grammar in this context. E.g.
>>> "every adverb contains 0 sentences" could be a reasonable statement.
>>
>> But it's also very useful to describe something that may or may not be present.  I don't know where regular expressions fit on the expressivity scale vis-a-vis predicate calculus, but it's sometimes better to search for todos with "to ?do" rather than "to do" or "todo".  And if one want to describe what the world may contain, do we have to settle for "the world contains elephants and eggplant and ..." and make guesses as to whether the world is closed, or can we simply communicate that "The world is all creation, at least 0 Creators, and nothing else"?
>
> In standard logic, you don't need a statement to "describe something that may or may not be present". If neither a statement nor its negation is present then it is interpreted as "may or may not be true".
>
> For this reason, "every sentence contains at least 0 adverbs" added as a comment has the same effect as adding it as an ACE sentence (assuming "0" is supported). This sentence simply contains no information. I agree that such statements could nevertheless be useful for a human reader.
>
>> Also, how would you continue past "Every key column has at most 1" to add "instance of a value"?
>
> Do you mean "every key column has at most 1 thing" where "thing" is a noun that covers everything (i.e. "everything is a thing")?
>
> The ACE->OWL translator actually supports this. So it would be easy to support in AceWiki. I put it onto my todo list.
>
>
> Tobias
>