Cognitive Machines Help Decision-Making

Roland Piquepaille writes "At Sandia National Laboratories, new "smart" machines can accurately infer your intents and help you to take better decisions or avoid mistakes. They could change in a near future how we interact with computers, according to this news release. The team who developed the concept associated cognitive psychologists and robotics researchers. The Sandia team thinks that "it's entirely possible that these cognitive machines could be incorporated into most computer systems produced within 10 years." This summary contains more details, including a photo of a "Sandia software developer operating a simulation trainer while a cognitive model of the software runs simultaneously.""

Comments

Result on human decision making?

[zapp]

I predict that if/when such a technology becomes prevalent, it will greatly reduce the human ability to make decisions.

Take for example any simple video game, how about MahJong (the stack of tiles that you have to match pairs on to remove them).

If you play it without the computer's aid, you develop a good eye for it and can do quite well. However, if you constantly hit the 'help' or 'hint' button, you become dependant on it showing you the next move, and never develop the skill for yourself.

To put it in context with other situations:
How many of you need a calculator to find a 10, 15, or 20% tip amount? Worse, how many of you need a calculator to add that extra 3.25 onto your 21.75 bill? I admit, it takes a great bit of effort for me to add simple numbers in my head simply because I don't exersize that ability enough.

Baby Steps

[invid]

I think calling this cognitive computing is a bit of an overstatement. It seems more like a heuristic tool that learns the behavioral patterns of a human and alerts the human when something deviates from the norm. We have a long way to go before we have real computer cognition.

Show me some real evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

These articles are just too brief to be worth anything. It seems like "AI" has been invented a million times, and yet I have not seen any real AI in my life (no quake bots do not count as true AI imho).

What this group has going sounds good, but so have many other things I've read about AI related. How about a video or something to show what it really does? I mean, if they have this mega software then making a video of it in action can't be all that hard can it?

Questions blatantly not answered in these articles:

• Does it read screen text? If so, how? OCR?
• What api's is it compatible with?
• What operating systems does it work with?
• What exactly is the special hardware?
• What spoken languages is it compatible with?
• Specifically, what kinds of decisions can this AI make, what decisions can it not?
• How long does it take to make a decision?

I could go on, but I think you get the point...

Hmmm....

[gwernol]

I don't know if these guys have something for real or not. Their press release is - perhaps unsurprisingly - fluff that says nothing about how their system is supposed to work. Without knowing some technical details its almost impossible to evaluate how sound their approach is and whether they've got anything new.

However a couple of things are suspicious. First they say "work on cognitive machines took off in 2002". So in less than 2 years they have essentially cracked several of the major problems that AI researchers have been struggling with for at least the last 4 decades? That seems unlikely. Second they seem to think that a combination of software engineering, cognitive psychology and robotics is the silver bullet of AI and that this is a radical new breakthrough. I hate to break it to them but these disciplines have been working together for many years in the AI community. This just isn't new.

Until we have a techical paper that describes their approach in detail and can be peer reviewed I will remain sceptical. AI got overhyped enough as it is, we don't need more extravegant claims and fluff press releases.