IBM Supercomputer wins first prize in US quiz program

[sjastro]

As if losing to a chess playing computer wasn't bad enough, now a voice recognition computer is world quiz champion.:mad2:

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/219893/ibm_watson_vanquishes_human_jeopard y_foes.html

Regards

Steven

[GrahamL]

I thought google was it in terms of artificial intelligence :mad2:;)

unplug the sucker and see if it can plug itself back in :)

[gary]

Hi Steven,

Thanks for the link to the interesting story. A fabulous achievement.

The article mentions that "The questions were entered into Watson by text; it did not
use voice-recognition technology".

In the movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(film))", when deprived of his higher level functions, HAL regresses
and announces that he became operational on January 12, 1997.
In 1997, MIT Press published a lovely book entitled "HAL's Legacy (http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/view?isbn=0262692112)", designed to
correspond with the fictional birth date. In a series of essays, contributors with
backgrounds in computer science looked at various aspects of HAL and compared
them with the state of the art as they existed in 1997. For example, there is
a chapter entitled "When Will HAL Understand What We Are Saying? Computer Speech
and Understanding". Some of the chapters of the book appear online here -
http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-books/hal/contents.html

Despite the enormous advances in computing since the book was published,
fourteen years on we still seem a long way off from fulfilling HAL's Legacy.

Maybe one day in our lifetimes.

Thanks again for the link. :thumbsup:

[Kal]

Speech recognition would be hardly a feat of computing, even cars have it now as you see on ads on tv :rofl:

The real marvel of this adventure, as listed in the article, is:

Perhaps the most useful software, however, is a natural language processing program called DeepQA that IBM claims can understand a human sentence. This program is what differs Watson from a typical search engine, which can just return a list of results to a set of keywords.

This is where the technological leap has been made, and I believe it is a natural step forward towards AI.

[CraigS]

I have a confession … I am the forerunner to Watson (Vers 0.1) ...

They trashed me ... due fits of confusion, unmitigated rage and a profound lack of memory and intelligence. :sadeyes:


:P :)

Cheers

[gary]

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -
attributed to Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943, though maybe
apocryphal as no source document has ever been cited for the alleged quote.

[Moon]

They also feed it the answers from the other contestants. This helps it determine the correct answer type for each question category. Clever, but kinda cheating.
James

[Octane]

Awesome. : )

Natural language processing was my major in my computing science degree, so, this is close to my heart. : D

H

[RickS]

You're not Mark V Shaney, are you? :)

It's interesting that AI has turned out to be much, much harder than most computer scientists thought.

[gary]

Hi Rick,

Interesting you should mention Mark V. Shaney as it was written by someone
I knew (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Ellis).

It was a play on words of "Markov chain (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain)".

I am sure a few here will remember ELIZA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA). :lol:

Best Regards

Gary

[RickS]

Gary,

I met Bruce a few times in the early days of Unix in Australia. I also attended an amusing presentation on Mark V Shaney by Rob Pike a couple of decades ago. And, yes, I remember Eliza :D

Cheers,
Rick.

[gary]

Hi Rick,

It's a small world. Upon graduation at UNSW I was employed there as a Professional
Officer at the Joint Microelectronics Research Center. Some of my colleagues were
from Sydney Uni and were friends with Bruce plus there were already very close ties
between the UNIX fraternity at UNSW, Sydney Uni and Bell Labs. Bruce had been
awarded the Sydney University Medal.

Mead & Conway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mead_%26_Conway_revolution) had written their book on VLSI design and lots of Multi-Project Chips (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-project_wafer_service)
were being designed. If there was any spare silicon along the periphery of the
design, we would usually like to 'write' our names in metal as a designer's signature.
I still remember that Bruce's design also had musical notes in the signature area
which looked pretty spiffy at the time.

Later in the '90's, Bruce was contracted at the company I was working for to co-write
a PostScript interpreter.

I also attended a few of Rob Pike's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike) talks when he came out and in particular I remember
his talk on the Blit graphics terminal (http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/) which was pretty cool at the time.
A forerunner to the workstation it was powered by a Motorola 68000.
A neat video about Blit that includes a cameo by Rob Pike appears here -
http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/blit/

Both Rob and Bruce also worked on Plan 9 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs) at Bell Labs, along with Thompson, Kerninghan, Ritchie, Stroustrop and others.

[RickS]

Gary,

I'll drop you a PM and we can reminisce without disturbing everybody else.

Cheers,
Rick.

[Tandum]

Does anyone know if this pic is true or not? Both human answers are wrong, but the PC player appears to be doing a format :rofl:

[OICURMT]

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
-- Bill Gates


Sorta shows how anyone can get it wrong... including the man that was instrumental in us "requiring" more than 640k

[Octane]

Fake. : )

H

[Tandum]

I figured it was. I can't see 2 people coming up with exactly the same wrong answer at the same time. Still funny though :lol:

[luigi]

Toronto!