Alchemist (disambiguation)

An alchemist is a person who practices alchemy. Alchemist may also refer to:

Books and stories

Art

Music

Alchemy

Alchemy is a philosophical and protoscientific tradition practiced throughout Egypt and Eurasia which aimed to purify, mature, and perfect certain objects. Common aims were chrysopoeia, the transmutation of "base metals" (e.g., lead) into "noble" ones (particularly gold); the creation of an elixir of immortality; the creation of panaceas able to cure any disease; and the development of an alkahest, a universal solvent. The perfection of the human body and soul was thought to permit or result from the alchemical magnum opus and, in the Hellenistic and western tradition, the achievement of gnosis. In Europe, the creation of a philosopher's stone was variously connected with all of these projects.

In English, the term is often limited to descriptions of European alchemy, but similar practices existed in the Far East, the Indian subcontinent, and the Muslim world. In Europe, following the 12th-century Renaissance produced by the translation of Arabic works on science and the Recovery of Aristotle, alchemists played a significant role in early modern science (particularly chemistry and medicine). Islamic and European alchemists developed a structure of basic laboratory techniques, theory, terminology, and experimental method, some of which are still in use today. However, they continued antiquity's belief in four elements and guarded their work in secrecy including cyphers and cryptic symbolism. Their work was guided by Hermetic principles related to magic, mythology, and religion.

Word-sense disambiguation

In computational linguistics, word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is an open problem of natural language processing and ontology. WSD is identifying which sense of a word (i.e. meaning) is used in a sentence, when the word has multiple meanings. The solution to this problem impacts other computer-related writing, such as discourse, improving relevance of search engines, anaphora resolution, coherence, inference et cetera.

The human brain is quite proficient at word-sense disambiguation. The fact that natural language is formed in a way that requires so much of it is a reflection of that neurologic reality. In other words, human language developed in a way that reflects (and also has helped to shape) the innate ability provided by the brain's neural networks. In computer science and the information technology that it enables, it has been a long-term challenge to develop the ability in computers to do natural language processing and machine learning.

To date, a rich variety of techniques have been researched, from dictionary-based methods that use the knowledge encoded in lexical resources, to supervised machine learning methods in which a classifier is trained for each distinct word on a corpus of manually sense-annotated examples, to completely unsupervised methods that cluster occurrences of words, thereby inducing word senses. Among these, supervised learning approaches have been the most successful algorithms to date.