Quote:
Originally Posted by sjastro
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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", 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", 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.
