SANSKRUT AND COMPUTING

We have greatly underestimated the sacred power of language. When the power of language to create and discover life is recognized, language becomes sacred; in ancient times, language was held in this regard. Nowhere was this more so than in ancient India. It is evident that the ancient scientists of language were acutely aware of the function of language as a tool for exploring and understanding life, and their intention to discover truth was so consuming that in the process of using language with greater and greater rigor, they discovered perhaps the most perfect tool for fulfilling such a search that the world has ever known the Sanskrut language.

There has recently been an astounding discovery made at the NASA research center. The following quote is from an article Sanskrut & Artificial Intelligence, which appeared in AI (Artificial Intelligence) magazine in spring of 1985, written NASA researcher Rick Briggs.

"In the past twenty years, much time, effort, and money has been expended on designing an unambiguous representation of natural languages to make them accessible to computer processing. These efforts have centered on creating schemata designed to parallel logical relations with relations expressed by the syntax and semantics of natural languages, which are clearly cumbersome and ambiguous in their function as vehicles for the transmission of logical data. Understandably, there is a widespread belief that natural languages are unsuitable for the transmission of many ideas that artificial languages can render with great precision and mathematical rigor.

But this dichotomy, which has served as a premise underlying much work in the areas of liguistics and artificial intelligence, is a false one. There is at least one language, Sanskrut, which for the duration of almost 3000 years was a living spoken language with a considerable literature of its own. Besides works of literary value, there was a long philosophical and grammatical tradition that has continued to exist with undiminished vigor until the present century. Among the accomplishments of the grammarians can be reckoned a method for paraphrasing Sanskrut in a manner that is identical not only in essence but in form with current work in Artificial Intelligence. This article demonstrates that a natural language can serve as an artificial language also, and that much work in AI has been reinventing a wheel millennia old."

This discovery is of monumental significance. It is mind-boggling to consider that we have available to us a language which has been spoken for at least 3000 years that appears to be in every respect a perfect language designed for enlightened communication. But the most stunning aspect of the discovery is this: NASA, the most advanced research center in the world for cutting-edge technology, has discovered that Sanskrut, the world's oldest spiritual language, is the only unambiguous spoken language on the planet.

He further comments, "The degree to which a semantic net (or any unambiguous non syntactic representation) is cumbersome and odd-sounding in a natural language is the degree to which that language is 'natural' and deviates from the precise or 'artificial.' As we shall see, there was a language (Sanskrut) spoken among an ancient scientific community that has a deviation of zero." Considering Sanskrut's status as a spiritual language, a further implication of this discovery is that the age-old dichotomy between religion and science is an entirely unjustified one. It is also relevant to note that in the last decade, physicists have begun to comment on the striking similarities between their own discoveries and the discoveries made thousands of years ago in India which went on to form the basis of most Eastern religions.

Perhaps the greatest hope for the return of Sanskrut lies in computers. It's precision play with computer tools could awaken the capacity in human beings to utilize their innate higher mental faculty with a momentum that could inevitably transform the world. In fact the mere learning by large numbers of people in itself would represent a quantum leap in consciousness, not to mention the rich endowment it would provide in the arena of future communication.