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Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans

(www.newscientist.com)
189 points docmechanic | 2 comments | 07 Apr 25 15:51 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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WalterBright ◴[11 Apr 25 18:43 UTC] No.43657035[source]▶
> One core block is syntax, where meaningful units are combined into longer sequences, like words into sentences.

I would think that syntax is a structure to the sequence of symbols, not just a sequence in any order. For example:

    Thag ate Fish
    Fish ate Thag
have different meanings.
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HarHarVeryFunny ◴[11 Apr 25 18:49 UTC] No.43657113[source]▶
Syntax is hierarchical, and not as much sequential as you may think. LLMs are based on these two facts.
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1. somenameforme ◴[12 Apr 25 05:43 UTC] No.43661661[source]▶
I think your sentence would be much more accurate if you replace hierarchical with recursive.
replies(1): >>43663666 #
2. HarHarVeryFunny ◴[12 Apr 25 12:02 UTC] No.43663666[source]▶
True, at least conceptually (does brain actually do recursion?) - I was really thinking of linguist's hierarchical sentence parse trees, which are a nice visual representation of how different parts of sentence are syntactically unrelated and can therefore be processed in parallel, with levels of the "hierarchy" then corresponding to layers of the LLM.