Engine for grounded language

One possible explanation why the symbol grounding problem has emerged late in the history of computer science is because the theory is difficult to realize on a computer. Suppose natural language is important for robot control, the problem is create a language parser which is working for a concrete domain.

A possible command for a robot might be "Move until obstacle and then stop". Each of the words is stored as a string, but it remains unclear who to process the instruction into actions for a robot. The reason is, that the sentence is formulated in English but computers need a programming language as input. Even if every word is encoded as a number, it doesn't make sense to submit an array with numbers to the robot because its not possible to add or subtract the values in a meaningful way.

In general the problem is how to convert natural language into a computer program. Without solving this issue, the symbol grounding problem remains only a philosophical problem without any practical consequences.

The good news is, that the problem of programming a parser can be solved. Not with tools from computer science but by using techniques from linguistics, namely language games. Instead of treating language parsing as an algorithm problem, the idea is to invent around words a puzzle game. Typical language games are:

- Name guessing game. Player1 points to an object in the reality, and Player2 has to tell the name
- NPC quest game, a non player character in a role playing game formulates a quest like "bring me the sword from the wood" and the player has to fulfill the task
- bounding box game, player1 says a word like "table" and player2 has to draw a bounding box around this object

All these language games are located outside of computer science. They have nothing to do with algorithms, programming language nor existing robotics libraries, but they are games played with 2 human players.

The interesting situation is, that its possible to simulate the games with a computer. The software encodes the rules of the language game, determines the score for the human player and then the player can take action inside this game.

The problem is not how to program a certain parser, but the problem is how to formulate the game outside of a computer first. A well formulated game can be implemented in a software with ease. The programmer needs only the specification of the game including its rule, and then its possible to program the game with python. The only requirement is, that the computer works like the original language game. The programming workflow is identical to implement card games and board games on a computer.