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.
Speech recognition would be hardly a feat of computing, even cars have it now as you see on ads on tv
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.
"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.
The article mentions that "The questions were entered into Watson by text; it did not use voice-recognition technology".
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
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
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
Cheers,
Rick.
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 had written their book on VLSI design and lots of Multi-Project Chips
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 talks when he came out and in particular I remember
his talk on the Blit graphics terminal 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 at Bell Labs, along with Thompson, Kerninghan, Ritchie, Stroustrop and others.
"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.
"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
