February 16, 201115 yr Active Members Missed Jeopardy last night, but sure glad I'm watching it tonight. Watson, IBM's new computer, is leaving the other two contestants in the dust. More later . . .
February 16, 201115 yr Missed Jeopardy last night, but sure glad I'm watching it tonight. Watson, IBM's new computer, is leaving the other two contestants in the dust. More later . . . I do not recall where but I read about this .. it looked kind of cool. But what I read also mentioned something the computer stumbled on? Maybe I am dreaming lol.
February 16, 201115 yr Author Active Members It stumbled on a lot of stuff in its early days a year or so ago. It's got a ton of information stored inside, but it had no context for its data. Last year, it confused a clue about the commander of a seventeenth century ship called 'Paramour Pink' with 'The Pink Panther' and answered "Who is Peter Sellers?" instead of "Who is Edmund Halley?". When Watson was wrong, it was laughably wrong. The engineers had millions of 'rules' programmed in the machine, but it still wasn't enough to get Watson in the running. Then they programmed in 'machine learning', gave the computer lots of examples, told it when it was wrong, and let Watson figure out the patterns that would make it right. Often enough to compete on Jeopardy anyway. It's been doing a lot better ever since, and is now leading two of the best Jeopardy players in history. I think IBM is executing an excellent marketing strategy here. They're leaping to the top of the heap of companies that can turn information into answers. Or, in the case of Jeopardy, questions. Tomorrow is Watson's third and last night appearing on Jeopardy. It's trying for a million dollar prize.
February 19, 201115 yr Puts me in mind of one of my favorite SF pieces -- Stanislaw Lem's novella "Golem XIV". About a supercomputer constructed in the mid-21st century, intended to be a military strategist but which achieves consciousness, then reconstructs itself to become vastly more capable and independent than its builders intended. It then gives an amazing series of lectures that upend mankind's conception of the nature (and "purpose") of evolution; of the "use" of intelligence from evolution's perspective ("the meaning of the transmitter is the transmission", not the other way around); of the coming necessity for mankind to choose between remaining an emotive species and dead-ending there, or forsaking emotion for intellect in order to continue evolving; and finally expounding on its own coming self-evolution to higher zones of intellect, which will require ever higher levels of energy to power its thinking, likely its move from the quantum/luminal structure built by its designers, into first a brown dwarf star (thinking by means of controlled refracting of light and heat there), then ultimately into a black hole, to "think with all the power available in the Universe" and, possibly, to discover what lies beyond the singularity. Mind-bending. http://www.lem.pl/english/works/novels/golem-xiv http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem_XIV
February 21, 201115 yr There was a PBS program devoted to Watson that showed a test match. I look forward to seeing the real match on a recording somehow. The PBS program concerned the issue of intelligence. Is Watson "intelligent"? It depends on what you mean by the term. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/intelligent
January 13, 20179 yr Author Active Members Watson's not playing games any more, and now he means business! Just ask the thirty-four workers who lost their jobs at Japan's Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance. The company figures Watson can calculate payouts as well as they can, and will pay for himself in two years. Even though he'll cost $1.7 million to install, and $128 thousand a year to maintain, he'll be saving the company a million dollars a year in salaries. I've often wondered if I'm talking to a robot at my insurance company, and I guess I won't be wondering much longer.
January 13, 20179 yr 3 hours ago, lookin said: the thirty-four workers who lost their jobs at Japan's Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance. Ohhhh, I'm sorry, that will cost you your $3,500 wager! Correct response should have been : Who was Watson?
January 14, 20179 yr Active Members 20 hours ago, lookin said: Watson's not playing games any more, and now he means business! Just ask the thirty-four workers who lost their jobs at Japan's Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance. The company figures Watson can calculate payouts as well as they can, and will pay for himself in two years. Even though he'll cost $1.7 million to install, and $128 thousand a year to maintain, he'll be saving the company a million dollars a year in salaries. I've often wondered if I'm talking to a robot at my insurance company, and I guess I won't be wondering much longer. AIs / Machine learning is getting quite interesting. But I was just reading an interesting article in Wired about the how inscrutable the decisions are. They are by definition a black box and the most you can control is the initial data they learn from. So say a machine is used to approve mortgages, it could decide race is a factor and be making decisions that are illegal without anybody's knowledge. The people that build them can't necessarily tell you why a certain decision was made. And they're going to be making decisions in healthcare, finances... maybe everything.
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