Quantification of literature

William Shakespeare

The analyses conducted about the literary field in the book The Quantification of History and the Future of the Western World cover almost three thousand years of Greco-Roman and Western literary history. This is a biographical analysis, based on recording the birth, flourishing, and death dates (if known), as well as the nationality of the writers. Each of the 210 historical figures considered has been assigned a quantitative rating, represented by a number between zero and ten. This number was calculated based on the number of lines dedicated to each author in the texts or encyclopedias used as the basis for the study.

The Chinese and artificial intelligence

Wolfgang von Goethe

The media has been reporting on a recent breakthrough in LLMs (large language models), the hottest applications in the field of artificial intelligence, which in the last two years have given rise to great hype, suspicions of stagnation and accusations of excessive energy and water costs.

This latest breakthrough has been achieved by a Chinese company, DeepSeek, which has jumped to the front line because it successfully competes with the big companies in the field, OpenAI (which built ChatGPT and GPT4) and Google (with GEMINI), but at a lower cost.

There are now many tools of this type, but the two mentioned in the previous paragraph (GEMINI and GPT4) provided the best performance, although they were the most expensive. Their code is secret, owned by the two companies (Google and OpenAI) and users cannot modify it. Alongside them, now there are others with open source, which can be adapted to each user, but with lesser performance.

They bark, therefore we ride

Illustration by Gustavo Doré

In September 2003, reading the book On the Will in Nature (1836) by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, I found the following words in page 40 of its Spanish translation by Alianza Editorial:

…according to those verses by Goethe: “The dog would like to come with us from the stable: the echo of its barking proves that we are riding.”

I immediately thought that this phrase must be the origin of the Spanish proverb they bark, therefore we ride, which used to be attributed to Don Quixote. Since I didn’t remember having read it there, just in case, I found a digitalized version of Don Quixote and looked up the phrase in question. It was not there. Next I did a Google search of the phrase, which came up with about sixty references, all of which stated that it was a phrase from Don Quixote. I also looked for the German translation of Goethe’s phrase as quoted by Schopenhauer, and got five references to Goethe’s poem Kläffer (Barker, 1808). Therefore, at that time the information used by Google to search for that phrase in Spanish was totally wrong, while the information written in German was correct, although less abundant.