What is "I love you, I hate you."
-PJ
Posted on 12/13/2010 9:36:29 PM PST by Justaham
The game show "Jeopardy" will pit man versus machine this winter in a competition that will show how successful scientists are in creating a computer that can mimic human intelligence.
Two of the venerable game show's most successful champions — Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — will play two games against "Watson," a computer program developed by IBM's artificial intelligence team. The matches will be spread over three days that will air Feb. 14-16, the game show said on Tuesday.
The competition is reminiscent of when IBM developed a chess-playing computer to compete against chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.
The "Jeopardy" answer-and-question format is a different kind of challenge. It often requires contestants to deal with subtleties, puns and riddles and come up with answers fast.
"Watson" is named for IBM founder Thomas J. Watson. It will look nothing like the computer "maid" on "The Jetsons." Rather, IBM said its on-screen appearance will be represented by a round avatar.
The computer has already been tested in some 50 games against past "Jeopardy" champions. But neither IBM nor "Jeopardy" representatives would say what "Watson's" record was.
The winner gets a $1 million prize. IBM said it would donate its winnings to charity, while Jennings and Rutter said they would give half of their prize money away.
Jennings had the game show's longest winning streak, taking 74 games in a row during the 2004-2005 season. Rutter has won more money than any other "Jeopardy" player, nearly $3.3 million during his original appearance and three subsequent tournaments.
IBM is hoping the technology it exhibits will have some practical uses eventually, for instance helping doctors diagnose illnesses or solving customer problems at technical support centers.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Exactly. The ability of the computer to comprehend and actualize responses from natural language. That is the main missing factor (there are others, but this one is the most obvious). For one to be able to have a ‘conversation’ with a computer, and not be able to tell the difference. I would be quite interested to watch this matchup, in particular if the questions that are asked are asked in the normal Jeopary manner. That will be quite the test. Someone asked if it is just someone googling responses, but that would be too slow against someone like Jennings (taking out the part of a human googling queries); and in the same breadth, even though a computer could do it much faster, it would have to understand natural language. Not set commands or key inputs ...normal natural language. The moment a computer can do that, and do that in a manner that is indistinguishable from an actual human being, is a point in time when computing will have taken an interesting (and quantum) jump. This, if it works, is quite a huge event.
Think I even could write a program that throws a "What is" before every answer ;^)
The Kasparov "victory" was a farce. IBM had multiple chess grand masters and computer programmers reprogramming the machine between matches, possibly even between moves. It proved that a wildly smart team could beat one man. It was a shameful hollow victory.
Kasparov remains one of the greatest chess players of all time.
Taking bets now on if the computer returns any results of porn or Nigerian scams.
David Bronstein was the real computer chess nut. He played every program he could, from dedicated machines like Big Blue to at least one game with Mac Chess.
Your garden-variety chess program wouldn’t stand a chance against a real opponent. None of the ones I’ve used ever understood anything except simple material gain.
What is "I love you, I hate you."
-PJ
I wonder if they can program the computer for the Before & After category. (i.e. “Who is Judge Judy Bloom”)
Know for a fact that VMS didn't like little things like that ;^)
Kind of like the $64,000 question.
IBM would not try this if they expected to be humiliated. Still, unless the question format is altered to give an advantage to the computer, I bet on the humans.
“Exactly. The ability of the computer to comprehend and actualize responses from natural language. That is the main missing factor (there are others, but this one is the most obvious). For one to be able to have a ‘conversation’ with a computer, and not be able to tell the difference. I would be quite interested to watch this matchup, in particular if the questions that are asked are asked in the normal Jeopary manner. That will be quite the test. Someone asked if it is just someone googling responses, but that would be too slow against someone like Jennings (taking out the part of a human googling queries); and in the same breadth, even though a computer could do it much faster, it would have to understand natural language. Not set commands or key inputs ...normal natural language. The moment a computer can do that, and do that in a manner that is indistinguishable from an actual human being, is a point in time when computing will have taken an interesting (and quantum) jump. This, if it works, is quite a huge event.”
This is a LOT harder than folks on this thread are giving credit for. However, I don’t think it is quite as revolutionary as that. The only thing that makes it feasible is the very rigid format of jeopardy. There is a subject and an answer. So key meaning parsings have been done for the computer already. That’s a long way from being able to have a conversation about an imaginary blue pony friend named Pony with a five year old while driving.
Text mining applications have only a decent success rate in extracting a subject from text and then a sense whether the text is positive or negative about the subject. They miss a lot.
If you are interested in this, one interesting and ambitious effort related to this is CYC from MIT. It has been in development for a decade and attempts to encode common sense for a computer. Link follows:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc
When this becomes reality many people on the left-hand side of the IQ bell curve will become more or less useless from the point of view of the economy. I think we are already observing that the productivity gains of the last few decades resulting in growing chronic unemployment.
Yeah, call me a cynic. ;)
And how's that been working out for them? I recently re-watched the original Tron, on TV. I saw the movie in '82, and liked it, but watching it now had me wondering what I had seen in it. Not only was the technical jargon not used accurately - which, of course, I didn't know when I was a kid - but also the plot was about ten years behind the times. It's as if Disney were preparing 1982's kids for the 1975 version of Rollerball.
It might sound like I'm slagging on Disney, but I'm really not. I'm sure the folks there consulted the best experts...
Will humans be reduced to machines? More likely that AI machines will develop certain human characterisitics, like a dislike of being shoved around.
That's kinda what I mean: How fast can you access the search engine and produce the results. My guess is that they already have an engine that parses the question into keywords and query on the basis of the least-common words (to minimize the return results) and then parse those results into an answer.
As another poster pointed out, IBM may not have been entirely on the up-and-up in the second match. Also, when Kasparov demanded a rematch, IBM refused and destroyed the computer.
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