Post-Googleism At IBM With Piquant

kamesh writes "James Fallows of the New York Times reports an interesting search technology that IBM is developing. IBM demonstrated a system called Piquant, which analyzed the semantic structure of a passage and therefore exposed 'knowledge' that wasn't explicitly there. After scanning a news article about Canadian politics, the system responded correctly to the question, 'Who is Canada's prime minister?' even though those exact words didn't appear in the article. What do you think?"

Comments

Wow

[setagllib]

That's pretty impressive. It takes quite a clever AI to read between lines and connect concepts, but I have to wonder how much of its 'understanding' was hard-coded rather than purely abstract. Would it be trivial to just stick in another language database and have it read translations of the article the same way?

Nevertheless it makes me feel like all the programming and design I've ever done is pathetic and I will never amount to anything. That's how it is in the software industry - always someone out there who makes you look bad.

Now...

[SharpFang]

Feed it the news about Iraq. Then ask it what the war was about.
Good bye, new system, too dangerous for "national security".