Last night I watched NOVA on PBS and found myself completely taken in watching the program. That’s something rare for me these days when I watch a science program because almost always somebody figures out a way to work in climate change or global warming or Al Gore or catastrophic weather and ruins the moment. Last night’s episode was the rare exception.
Yes, in case you have not heard, IBM has created an AI machine to play Jeopardy!. Now mind you, this is not just any game of Jeopardy!, but a game against the two biggest superstars the program has ever produced; Ken Jennings, who won 74 games straight, and Brad Rutter, the all time money winner. The show debuts next week, on the Jeopardy! IBM Challenge, February 14, 15, and 16.
I was very impressed for two reasons:
- The strength of programming behind this machine
- The fact that this is a uniquely American achievement that we can be proud of
Watch this video of a test round with the players to get an idea of the scale of this accomplishment.
There’s lot’s more to learn at the IBM website here, it is fun learning about this great achievement and well worth the look. The strategy behind the programming was interesting too.
But what is it good for besides playing Jeopardy!?
The science behind the programming is pattern recognition combined with machine learning, and this feature, combined with a huge database of knowledge, may soon allow for a truly interactive computer that we’ve all come to know via SciFi like the ships computer on Star Trek. For example, a health care computer that could take in your symptoms and respond with a possible diagnosis.
Mark your calendar to watch Jeopardy! next week, this is science history being made.
Mike McMillan says: “Smartest Machine on Earth?” Nonsense. Everyone knows it’s the thermos bottle.
Absolutely. If you want it to keep it hot, it keep it hot. If you want it to keep it cold, it keep it cold. How do it know?
Computers have come a long way baby.
There’s a documentary about another IBM computer, Deep Blue, playing chess against Kasparov. It’s called “Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine”. The documentary didn’t turn out like I thought it would. I feel very sorry for Kasparov.
It’s in 9 parts at YouTube. It is also worth watching.
Part 1
I have no idea about comparability here, but I think some folkds at Creighton University had medical diagnosis software running (I forget which platform–1100/70 and DMS1100, MAPPER, or a UNIX platform) in the 1980’s.
Juice says:
February 10, 2011 at 5:36 am
Maybe a supercomputer can overcome the “information problem” outlined by Friedrich Hayek, which says that central planners in a command economy can never possess all the information necessary to dictate exactly how each local transaction should occur. This better carried out by local actors deriving information from the prices of goods and services. See: See: http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/hayek.htm
No supercomputer can do that. In fact it is not doable at all. Large systems have to have a recursively modular structure otherwise control costs just explode. Even if the technology is given, you just push the costs to building a supercomputer (and data collection system) that can cope with the task. As soon as this cost exceeds (or even comes close to) all the revenues generated and taxes collected, you end up with a self-serving system that has no useful output at all. At that point control should be abandoned and mayhem is ensued. There is no way around it, since be c (specific cost of control) as small as you like (within reasonable limits of course), still c×N >> log(N) even for moderately large values of N (effective size of the system).
Berényi Péter ,
“… As soon as this cost exceeds (or even comes close to) all the revenues generated and taxes collected, you end up with a self-serving system that has no useful output at all. …”
Could you then say you had created an Artificial Bureaucracy?
A fantastic achievement; far sooner than I expected to see it.
They like to call what a human brain does “learning”. But that is a fantasy of philosophers. It is a machine. It will only ever do what it is built to do.
John Searle came up with a similar argument against AI with his “Chinese Room” thought experiment. He naively confused the room and the human in the room with the system/mind which was forming the responses. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
And don’t forget Terry Bisson’s wonderful short story “They’re made out of meat”, online here: http://baetzler.de/humor/meat_beings.html
There’s nothing so special about an organic brain.
Derek Sorensen says:
February 11, 2011 at 4:31 pm
There’s nothing so special about an organic brain.
Ya, heck, it created the computer. The computer didn’t create itself. Nothin special about that. ;O)
Very simple things can look like they are on par with human ability. But they are still very simple things.
How did words on paper in this video duplicate what a human did?? Humans aren’t anything special compared to paper and ink. You could mix the two up. ;O)
I wonder–beyond the question of an inorganic brain somehow magically appearing (which in and of itself is an interesting notion for the antihumanists to propound)–would such a brain implement policies (like our human brain does) that will certainly destroy it by wasting all of its resources, refusing to develop resources needed for its existence and so on. Would it deny its own importance in the universe?