The SPIRIT of Rick Briggs was upon President Ram Nath Kovind at the conference of the Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, where he said Sanskrit is the most fitting language for composing calculations, and for AI and man-made brainpower. He resuscitated a nationalist legend that refuses to die, and it is strengthened by every iteration.
Oh, and here’s the thesis. Have a look Knowledge Representation in Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has already started making great promises in vast areas of science, agriculture and manufacturing. This emerging period of partnerships between humans, machines and artificial intelligence brings with it the recent rise of opportunities. Day-to-Day engineering may be seen as one with artificial intelligence and the justifiable, standard, and reasonable use of military technology to accomplish organization success.
Rick Briggs gives a brief history of Sanskrit language practitioners such as Panini, Kaundabhatta, Bhattoji Dikshita and Nagesha. Panni, who lived in the middle of the 4th century BCE, laid a solid foundation for the Sanskrit grammar. Panini’s successors like Bartrhari gave rise to algebraic grammar and tried to improve themselves. During the 16th century Kaundabhatta and Buttoji Dikshita provided new information on the existing grammar through their publication of the Vaiyakarana-bhusanasara by Bapttoji Dikshita. Similarly during the 17th century Nagesha gave language to his great work at Vaiyakaranasiddhantamanjusa, or the Treasurer of the descriptive statements of the linguists. The author sets out these linguistic frameworks and makes a strong point that Sanskrit is not only a spoken language but has its own scientific and mathematical backbone.
During the late 1980’s and 1990’s, a whole new approach to Artificial Intelligence was began when Rick Briggs, an associate scientist from NASA published an article entitled “Knowledge Representation with Sanskrit and Artificial Intelligence”. In the past forty years , much effort , money and time is spent for representing and designing a language which can be accessible to computer processing.
He also explained the purpose of the paper was to show that native language can serve as an artificial language as well, and that much of the work in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has restored the millennial wheel. It is important to understand that people and computers understand different languages. “Natural Languages” are languages understood by people such as English, Hindi and even Sanskrit. On the other hand, “Mechanical / Programming Languages” includes Lisp or C or Prolog or Python. The main purpose of him at that time was to reach a point where computers understood “natural languages”.
Rick Briggs also refers towards the difficulty that an artificial intelligence would have in understanding the true meaning of the words and understanding the emotions behind those words. In this thesis, he also gave a solution for the above problem by using natural language i.e. Sanskrit. Sanskrit was always been an important language before intellectual communities. Despite its ancient origin, the language has some amazing properties that can be considered helpful in different fields of research. When Rick Briggs published this journal stressing the involvement of Sanskrit in AI, is really a honour proving its power for being a valuable course of literature.
Before reading this thesis, First question which encountered me was “how a language like Sanskrit can pay a way towards the future of Artificial Intelligence At first, I considered the language Sanskrit to be a sacred and religious language. So I tried to understand more about it and how it can be an advantage over Artificial Intelligence. As Sanskrit is a language which is followed over hundreds and thousands of years, I tried to bow my head into the ocean of Sanskrit and realised that it’s a language which is actually easy to be followed and understand for machine with AI. Writing algorithms using Sanskrit is actually easy compared to other languages because of its strict rules and valued grammars .I would also like to mention what Francis Sullivan stated about algorithms,
“Algorithms are the poetry of computation. Just like verse, they can be terse, allusive, dense, and even mysterious. But once unlocked, they cast a brilliant new light on some aspect of computing.”
I would say that the rules of the Sanskrit system equate this definition with tea. Lets just take an example which he used primarily to make us understand about the above mentioned difficulty and also why the use of natural language in the field of AI is recommended. Sentence “That’s exactly what I needed today!” can be interpreted and expressed in different senses. In one instance a fine and happy individual finding some lost things which is closer to his heart that had been lost for some amount of time could be cheered up or excited from the situation. And exclaim this moment of triumph was exactly what their day needed to be happy. On the other hand , a disgruntled individual or a student having a rough day could accidently worsen the situation by slipping on a banana peel and sarcastically exclaim that this further exasperation was exactly what he needed today. This sentence could be interpreted as a man expressing that slipping on a banana peel made his bad day worse.
The above problem can be minimised by using natural language. The grammar of Sanskrit is structured in such a way that its is formula bound, logical and rule-bound, which makes it highly appropriate for writing algorithms. Sanskrit has a rich history and was used in early Indian mathematics and Vedic science. The structured grammar also make Sanskrit suitable for ML and even artificial intelligence.
Rick Briggs, in his thesis, challenged that belief by gaining attention to this fact that there has existed at least one language Sanskrit, even though in theory, be used in the form of an artificial language. The logical structure it had mapped the representation of knowledge scheme perfectly.
The first idea was to use a standard representation system using Semantic Nets was developed, followed by the framework of the ancient Grammar method of analyzing sentences. Eventually, the exact similarities between the two will be struck, and the implementation of the same doctrine will be given.
Consider the sentence “Out of friendship, Maitra cooks rice for Devadatta in a pot over a fire”
The triples corresponding to the net are:
cause, event, friendship
friendship, object_1, Devadatta
friendship, object_2, Maitra
cause, result, cook
cook, agent, Maitra
cook, recipient, Devadatta
cook, instrument, fire
cook, object, rice
cook, on-lot, pot.The sentence in the Indian analysis is rendered as follows: The Agent is represented by “Maitra”, the instrument by “fire”, the Object by “rice”,” the cause by “friendship” (between Maitra and Devadatta), the Recipient by “Devadatta” and the Locality by “pot.”
Since all these syntactic structures represent the actions auxiliary to the action “cook,” we can write its sentence representation;
cook, agent, Maitra
cook, object, rice
cook, instrument, fire
cook, recipient, Devadatta
cook, because-of, friendship
friendship, Maitra, Devadatta
cook, locality, pot.A comparison of these analyses shows that the Sanskrit sentence when arranged ,it is similar to the analysis reached using computerized analysis. That is quite surprising, since the Sanskrit sentence formed is very different from that of English. The sentence translated to Sanskrit is given below for comparison:
मैत्रः सौहर्द्यत देवदत्ताय ओदनं घटे अग्निना पचति
( Maitrah: sauhardyat Devadattaya odanam ghate agnina pacati) . The wording order in Sanskrit is usually less important than style, and Sanskrit theologians paid little attention to it. That language is well suited to a method that removes syntax and generates basically a list of semantic messages associated with karakas.
Conclution
This thesis is a wonderful theoretical representation for depicting the advantage of Sanskrit over other linguistic language in the field of Artificial Intelligence . This study honours the ancient Indo-Aryan language , Sanskrit. If a scientist is successful in his study, it would be good to see a machine programmed in a natural language and communicate in Sanskrit.
Indian President Shri Ram Nath Kovind also addressed in the 17th Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha conference held at New Delhi on Sanskrit communications and Artificial Intelligence.
I have done a lot of research over the internet to find some interesting works related to this topic, and surprisingly, Even after continuous research done by different scientists there are no other works in related fields attributed to this name. Research has been done for more than 20 years at NASA. However, NASA has not issued any official statement on the study. Hoping that our generation would take this idea.
This thesis is recommended to all those young computer scientists. It has the potential to lit a fire in their progress as well as in the field of AI.
References
- Briggs, R. November 1985. Knowledge representation in Sanskrit and artificial intelligence. RIACS, NASA Ames Research Centre, Moffet Field, California 94305,.AEEE.
https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/466 - Ramaswamy, Vanitha. 1990., Some concepts of sanskrit grammar and their application to computers. https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/10603/172376