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Re:King – man + woman is queen; but why? by snovv_crash on Saturday January 07, 2017 @06:25PM (#13347285)
A king minus a man is a monarch. Add a woman and you get a queen. I don't see why this is so complicated. It is just like adding or removing adjectives from something.
Re:King – man + woman is queen; but why? by laxatives on Sunday January 08, 2017 @02:32AM (#13348768)
This is nonsensical if you don't already have some existing notion of a relationship. These are vectors, not concepts. There a loads of operations that don't have any intuitive notion, yet are well defined in the context of vectors and most likely yield useless results.
Re:King – man + woman is queen; but why? by snovv_crash on Sunday January 08, 2017 @04:32AM (#13349039)
Well isn't that true of all abstractions? They give us tools that we couldn't use before, and some of those tools don't make sense. I mean, in real physics it doesn't make sense to add different dimensions, eg time and distance, but math lets us do that, because they are 'just numbers'. We need to know that dimensions can only be multiplied and divided, and dimensional analysis needs to be done afterwards to check the unit of the result.

However, something like the dot-product here does make sense, since you can use it to determine similarities of vectors.

Re:King – man + woman is queen; but why? by coldtea on Sunday January 08, 2017 @08:14AM (#13349569)
>This is nonsensical if you don't already have some existing notion of a relationship.

The engine does have an emergent notion of the relationship, which is the whole point.

Re:King – man + woman is queen; but why? by taeric on Saturday January 07, 2017 @08:40PM (#13347744)
That doesn't follow in any addition sense. A king minus man can just be a dead king. Or a eunuch. Or, a lonely king.

Similarly, add a woman to a person, and you just have two people. One being a woman.

I get that there is an answer that seems fun... But there is not a deep meaning to the math.

This is like the games where "send + more = money". Fun. But is there really something illuminating?

Re:King – man + woman is queen; but why? by snovv_crash on Sunday January 08, 2017 @04:27AM (#13349028)
Stop thinking literally, and instead think of the concept. A king is a male monarch. So remove the male, and you have monarch. Add female and you have female monarch = queen.

Similarly with woman + person, the concept of woman is femininity. It makes sense if you think in terms of concepts.

Re:King – man + woman is queen; but why? by coldtea on Sunday January 08, 2017 @08:15AM (#13349572)
>That doesn't follow in any addition sense. A king minus man can just be a dead king. Or a eunuch. Or, a lonely king.

Yes, and some of those meanings can be closer to the common understanding of reality or the weight of each notion or its probability than others.

Which is also why we can solve riddles and don't get lost in their infinite similar possibilities.