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Human vs Computer Intelligence
DrLudicrous writes "The NYTimes is running an article regarding tests devised to differentiate from human and computer intelligence. One example are captchas, which can consists of a picture of words, angled and superimposed. A human will be able to read past the superposition, while a computer will not, and thus fails the test. It also goes a bit into some of Turing's predictions of what computers would be like by the year 2000."
Sure, computers aren't as smart as people. Wow.
Computers are not good at complex pattern recognition. Wow.
For the record, computers can recognize words like this, just not very easily. With a big enough dictionary and a lot of patience, you'd be suprised at what they can do. While still an undergrad I was able to write a rather simple program that would recognize images of the cardinal numerals, even if they were highly mangled, and worked with a grad student in building something that could pick out certain features of a rotated image and by comaring with some sample features, rotate the image correctly.
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Searle's Chinese Room theory. Strong AI vs. Weak AI and human interaction/interpretation. Fun Stuff. http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/c/chineser.htm
It's very easy to do a search at news.google.com with some of the words from the story summary and come up with the story elsewhere.
Yes, it's a nytimes.com link, but it's without the registration.
Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil have bet $20,000 on whether a computer will pass the Turing Test by 2029.
Sorry, my friend, but you're off by 20%. According to the UN, 97% of Americans can read. Not as many was we'd like, but far from 23% illiterate.
That depends on whether you count level 1 literacy (that's roughly equivalent to being able to recognize street signs) as being able to read.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush