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My Puny Human Brain
Slate ^ | 16 Feb 11 | Ken Jennings

Posted on 02/18/2011 8:04:44 AM PST by GATOR NAVY

When I was selected as one of the two human players to be pitted against IBM's "Watson" supercomputer in a special man-vs.-machine Jeopardy! exhibition match, I felt honored, even heroic. I envisioned myself as the Great Carbon-Based Hope against a new generation of thinking machines—which, if Hollywood is to be believed, will inevitably run amok, build unstoppable robot shells, and destroy us all. But at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, an Eero Saarinen-designed fortress in the snowy wilds of New York's Westchester County, where the shows taped last month, I wasn't the hero at all. I was the villain.

This was to be an away game for humanity, I realized as I walked onto the slightly-smaller-than-regulation Jeopardy! set that had been mocked up in the building's main auditorium. In the middle of the floor was a huge image of Watson's on-camera avatar, a glowing blue ball crisscrossed by "threads" of thought—42 threads, to be precise, an in-joke for Douglas Adams fans. The stands were full of hopeful IBM programmers and executives, whispering excitedly and pumping their fists every time their digital darling nailed a question. A Watson loss would be invigorating for Luddites and computer-phobes everywhere, but bad news for IBM shareholders.

(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: jeopardy; supercomputer

1 posted on 02/18/2011 8:04:47 AM PST by GATOR NAVY
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To: GATOR NAVY

interesting


2 posted on 02/18/2011 8:12:19 AM PST by PGR88
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To: GATOR NAVY

I, for one, enjoy Jeopardy and was thinking of trying out for it - until this computer match-up.
I think it’s total crap and that the other guys were chumps to sign up for it (unless they were promised mucho moola).
I refused to watch it...


3 posted on 02/18/2011 8:18:01 AM PST by matginzac
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To: matginzac
I refused to watch it...

Tha's a shame. I thought it was very interesting.

4 posted on 02/18/2011 8:22:44 AM PST by Ditto (Nov 2, 2010 -- Partial cleaning accomplished. More trash to remove in 2012)
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To: GATOR NAVY
IBM has bragged to the media that Watson's question-answering skills are good for more than annoying Alex Trebek. The company sees a future in which fields like medical diagnosis, business analytics, and tech support are automated by question-answering software like Watson. Just as factory jobs were eliminated in the 20th century by new assembly-line robots, Brad and I were the first knowledge-industry workers put out of work by the new generation of "thinking" machines. "Quiz show contestant" may be the first job made redundant by Watson, but I'm sure it won't be the last...

I understood then why the engineers wanted to beat me so badly: To them, I wasn't the good guy, playing for the human race. That was Watson's role, as a symbol and product of human innovation and ingenuity. So my defeat at the hands of a machine has a happy ending, after all. At least until the whole system becomes sentient and figures out the nuclear launch codes. But I figure that's years away.

5 posted on 02/18/2011 8:27:17 AM PST by Jeff Winston
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To: GATOR NAVY
speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.

It sounded like a male homosexual's voice. Why are HAL computers always gay?

6 posted on 02/18/2011 8:40:02 AM PST by Reeses
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To: GATOR NAVY
I was impressed by Watson's performance — until I considered that “he” consisted of 2,800 typical PCs wired together in about a 400 square foot room and, including his 12 tons of COOLING equipment, probably weighed around 10 tons and was competing with a human consisting of a 3# lump of specialized nerve cells called a brain which was fully portable and was self-cooling.

I think it will be a long time before IBM can scale Watson down to anything as miraculous and efficient as we are.

7 posted on 02/18/2011 9:13:05 AM PST by Dick Bachert
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To: Dick Bachert
"...with a human consisting of a 3# lump of specialized nerve cells called a brain which was fully portable and was self-cooling.
I think it will be a long time before IBM can scale Watson down to anything as miraculous and efficient as we are."

Well said, besides the human brain is also focusing on a billion other functions while its competing against a single-minded machine:
Keeping that complex body humming along and all of its seperate systems in synch.
Thinking about his job, politics, relationships, etc., all passing through his consious mind - I mean none of us can make it stop - that stuff just humms along inside there....

8 posted on 02/18/2011 9:35:15 AM PST by Psalm 73 ("Gentlemen, you can't fight in here - this is the War Room".)
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To: Psalm 73

Yes, “We are fearfully and wondrously made.”

(Even the nutjob “progressives.” They’re just incorrectly wired.)


9 posted on 02/18/2011 10:56:49 AM PST by Dick Bachert
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To: Dick Bachert

“I think it will be a long time before IBM can scale Watson down to anything as miraculous and efficient as we are.”

I hate to admit that you might very possibly be wrong, in as much as “scaling down” is not the real issue.

Could you have competed against the two human contestants, and done as good or better than they did?

That’s the real question and I believe that there may not be a very large number of human’s who could have done as well or better than the two human contestants.

But now the computer industry knows “a machine” could match them. And, making copies of that machine is very easy and the only food those machines need is electricity, to “work” 24/7/365.

What IBM proved is that “a machine”, having no prior knowledge of the questions, could compete against two humans known to be superior at answering complex questions covering a very broad range of subjects.

It will be easier, I believe, for the computer industry to create many “Watsons” than it will for our society to create (and put to use) many people like the two Watson competed against.


10 posted on 02/18/2011 11:00:30 AM PST by Wuli
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To: Dick Bachert

I thought Watson’s failures were more interesting than its successes-how the heck did it get “Toronto” for an answer to the first day’s Final Jeopardy? You would think the category being “U.S. Cities” would eliminate that immediately as a potential answer.


11 posted on 02/18/2011 11:08:46 AM PST by GATOR NAVY ("The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen." -Dennis Prager)
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To: Psalm 73
Psalm 73 said: "I think it will be a long time before IBM can scale Watson down to anything as miraculous and efficient as we are."

It wasn't that long ago that technologists considered the ability to play chess as a goal for computers that would indicate a dramatic accomplishment. That goal has since been passed and practically forgotten.

Moore's Law predicts an exponential growth in computer attributes such as speed, memory size, and compactness with the attribute doubling or halving every two years.

Assuming that Watson requires a room which is ten by ten by twenty feet, how many doublings of computer density would be required to fit it into a package of a six inch cube?

My rought calculation suggests this could happen in 35 years; a mere eye-blink in recorded history. The cost could be expected to be below $1000. I probably won't live to see it, but my daughters will. Life will be very different then.

12 posted on 02/18/2011 12:08:36 PM PST by William Tell
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To: GATOR NAVY
GATOR NAVY said: "I thought Watson’s failures were more interesting than its successes ..."

Yes.

In my early years I watched the "moving target" which artificial intelligence had become. Everybody had their own ideas of what would constitute "intelligence". As soon as people understood how to accomplish any given level of performance, the definition shifted to something more challenging. People were never impressed by a machine accomplishing something that they could understand.

Playing championship level chess is one example. Once it was done, people treat it like the brute force effort that it was. The computers, being able to analyze millions of positions per second, only needed a little algorithmic help to prune the search trees to make the most of that ability. People were not so impressed when they understood how it was done.

Recognizing that effect, I decided to change my personal definition of "arificial intelligence". It is any accomplishment by artificial means which CANNOT be fully understood.

I would assume that Watson maintained a "log" of its activities during the competition. Searching through that log, it should be possible for the creators of Watson to figure out what went wrong and to make corrections so that in future Watson will know the answer to that question. (Or, more correctly, the question to that answer.)

At some point in the future it will become impractical to make or examine such an activity log. At that point, we will have created artificial intelligence. Just as with real intelligence, it won't be correct all the time. And just as real intelligence, it won't be possible to understand exactly how it works.

I'm willing to believe that such an intelligence may require an artificial brain perhaps orders of magnitude more complex than the human brain.

13 posted on 02/18/2011 12:25:47 PM PST by William Tell
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To: William Tell
Your 35-year calculation (but you probably know this) is also the approximate date at which Ray Kurzweil predicts the likely arrival of the Singularity.

Watson's achievement is impressive, all the more so in that it comes in 2011 and not some years hence.

A computer is now the world champion of Jeopardy, a FAR more difficult undertaking than chess, which less than 3 years ago was likened (elsewhere on the web) to a "canary in the coal mine." A an interesting quote from that article:

Let’s recall what the respected AI theorist Douglas Hofstadter said about chess in his famous book Godel, Escher, Bach, published in 1979:

Question: Will there be chess programs that can beat anyone?

Speculation: No. There may be programs which can beat anyone at chess, but they will not be exclusively chess players. They will be programs of general intelligence, and they will be just as temperamental as people.

Clearly Hofstadter was way off the mark here, in light of Deep Blue’s defeat of Garry Kasparov in 1997 and the situation today, where software such as Rybka, running on a desktop PC, can defeat the strongest players in the world.

It took only 18 years to make "respected AI theorist Douglas Hofstadter" look like an idiot. It took only 14 years to go from chess to Jeopardy.

Of course, being able to play Jeopardy is nothing like general intelligence. The same program, asked to chitchat about the weather, would draw an utter blank. But this is a huge milestone on the way to a generalized AI.

Throw in speech recognition, and you're getting close to the computer from Star Trek.

14 posted on 02/18/2011 1:46:49 PM PST by Jeff Winston
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To: Dick Bachert
I was impressed by Watson's performance — until I considered that “he” consisted of 2,800 typical PCs wired together in about a 400 square foot room and, including his 12 tons of COOLING equipment, probably weighed around 10 tons and was competing with a human consisting of a 3# lump of specialized nerve cells called a brain which was fully portable and was self-cooling.

The old IBM 360 MAINFRAME computers that I used to work with took up more like 4000 square feet, had at least 12 tons of cooling equipment, probably weighed more than 10 tons.

A cell phone has more computer 'power' than those old mainframes.

We had two mainframes. One had 500k of memory, the other had 750k (WOOHOO!).

A cell phone has more computing power today than those old mainframes.

It may be a while before a computer can do ALL the things the BRAIN/MIND (whatever that is) can do, but I bet it won't be long before they 'shrink' the hardware they used to play Jeopardy down to something more reasonable in size.

15 posted on 02/19/2011 11:35:32 AM PST by UCANSEE2 (Lame and ill-informed post.)
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To: William Tell; Psalm 73

I agree with you that the hardware will rapidly shrink in size, but what I think will make the most difference is the software (and firmware).

We will learn to write programs to make better use of parallel processors, and reduce the need for so much hardware.


16 posted on 02/19/2011 11:44:58 AM PST by UCANSEE2 (Lame and ill-informed post.)
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To: UCANSEE2
UCANSEE2 said: "We will learn to write programs to make better use of parallel processors, and reduce the need for so much hardware."

When the Intel Pentium processors first came out I decided that I needed to know more about how they work. I don't claim to have become an expert, but I was fascinated by aspects of the internal architecture.

It really contains multiple parallel processing such that a stream of instructions can be processed simultaneously, with special hardware to patch things up in the few cases where a later instruction is dependent upon the results of a prior instruction. It's kind of like, "Just do it and correct any errors later". The cost of this approach is a much more highly complex chip. The benefit is much faster processing.

This approach to processing would make it critical to design compilers that are compatible with the processor. The compiler would optimize speed by avoiding situations where the processor would have to do more "fixing up".

17 posted on 02/19/2011 12:09:29 PM PST by William Tell
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To: William Tell

The term ‘artificial intelligence’ has been misapplied for years.

I remember First Gen AI, then 2nd, then 3rd, then 4th.

IBM came to our worksite to demo a 4th Gen AI program. It had a list of questions that you supplied data for, and then it calculated the cost of your insurance based on that ‘data’. I laughed at it and them, because I had an ANALOG COMPUTER made out of plastic and wires back when I was a kid, and it could do the same thing.

NOW, that being said, there were some other ‘programs’ that I ran into on other computers (D.E.C.) that gave the appearance of ‘intelligence’.

The first was a program call DUNGEON. It was Dungeons and Dragons and you played it by simply typing in what you wanted to do. The reason I thought it was AI was because it could parse whatever you typed in and give a response. It was pretty darn good at figuring out what you ‘meant’.

The other program was on the VAX mainframes back at DEC headquarters. I didn’t know about it until several years after I started working with a DEC Minicomputer. I had to place many service calls, and always thought the person on the other end was very friendly, helpful, and easy to talk to.

One day, one of the C.E’s (customer engineers) from DEC came out to work on our PDP 11/70 (DEC minicomputer) and somehow we got around to talking about AI and VOICE recognition software, and voice output from computers.

That was when he told me that the ‘person’ I called at DEC to place my service call, wasn’t a person at all. It was a program on the VAX. I can tell when I hear a computer generated ‘voice’ on the phone, but I couldn’t tell that the DEC service line was a computer generated voice.

Just like the MacIntosh’s (Apple computers) that had voice software that could read any text on your computer TO YOU.
I had such software on my MAC 30 years ago. Funny, I hardly ever hear of anyone having such voice software on a PC, and when they do, the voice is really crappy and you can tell it isn’t a human.

Sometimes it seems like we are going backward, technologically.


18 posted on 02/19/2011 12:09:47 PM PST by UCANSEE2 (Lame and ill-informed post.)
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To: UCANSEE2
UCANSEE2 said: "The first was a program call DUNGEON"

I remember when the Adventure program first became available on a timeshare computer at work. A friend of mine and I spent several weeks of evenings mapping out Colossal Cave. At the time, that program understood a seemingly large number of words.

19 posted on 02/19/2011 12:17:54 PM PST by William Tell
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To: UCANSEE2

You may well be right given that in the early days of computers, some pretty savvy people said some pretty silly things:

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science,
1949

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and
talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data
processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.” The editor
in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

“But what ... is it good for?” Engineer at the Advanced
Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the
microchip.

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their
home.” Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital
Equipment Corp., 1977

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” Bill Gates, 1981


20 posted on 02/19/2011 7:23:59 PM PST by Dick Bachert
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