Slashdot Mirror
IBM's Question-Answering System "Watson" Revisited
religious freak writes "IBM has created and made the question answering algorithm, Watson, available online. Watson has competed in and won a majority of (mock) matches against humans in Jeopardy. Watson does not connect to the Internet to answer his questions, but rather seeks answers using many different algorithms then employs a ranking algorithm to choose the best answer." We mentioned Watson last year as well.
Part of the deal with Jeopardy! is that they will have as part of the 2010-2011 season be a televised episode in which record-breaking champ Ken Jennings will play against Watson, with a to-be-named-later champion in the third slot. This has been in the works since 2009, but the staff of the show finally thinks the system is ready for it's televised match.
One key factor is how the human behavior will change when prize money is at stake. Jennings has proven in numerous appearances on GSN that he's willing to play in any test of knowledge and the fact that he knew he was Jeopardy's first millionaire in regular season play didn't stop his long Jeopardy! run. He also studied for the show, particularly alcoholic beverages (which he doesn't drink) because he had seen the Potent Potables category on TV.
But, what about that player-to-be-named later? Will they know more than the grad students... and play the game not as if it's for points but real dollars?
and see students from the MIT Robotics Lab test their machine that they say can avoid the Bankrupts and find that Million Dollar wedge on the Wheel of Fortune!
If it can properly rate if these people are hot or not.
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Chess has finally been solved to the point that there's now unbeatable AIs available to the average user (assuming it gets to move first)
There are no unbeatable AIs for chess yet, that would imply chess is a solved game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solving_chess). It doesn't make much of a difference who moves first, either.
Chess has finally been solved to the point that there's now unbeatable AIs available to the average user (assuming it gets to move first)...
No, checkers has been solved to that point. The solution is available online. Perfect play leads to a draw.
Computer chess is merely at the point that if you haven't been on the cover of Chess Life, you're going to get trounced. Even if you have, you're going to lose more than you win. The current situation is that Deep Rybka 2010 has an ELO rating around 3150. That's running on a 4-core AMD-64 desktop machine. The all-time human record is 2851, which Garry Kasparov had in 1999-2000.
This is a given, since there aren't even any AIs yet, so there could be no unbeatable AIs.
I admit that as a programmer this is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. But people: computers are NOT "intelligent". At all. They do what they do by performing the same specific instructions over and over and over again. That's what computers are good at. Granted, they do more complex things today, but that's just due to clever programming and the ability to do many more instructions many times faster than before (i.e., better hardware and software). But that's just quantity. What it lacks is quality. No matter how clever a combination of processors and program may seem at some specific task, it totally lacks the quality we call "intelligence". To call anything running on a computer today "intelligent" is to undermine the word itself. You might as well call a rock an airplane.
Researchers in this field 20 years ago would have been appalled at what people today refer to as "AI". Of course they would also be appalled at the lack of progress in that same field, but that's another matter.
I am not pointing fingers at the posters here. They are just using "AI" in the way it has become commonly used. But that is an erroneous use and I would be happy to see the practice stop. It gives people the wrong idea.
If we (erroneously) call what occurs today "intelligent", then if something ever really did become intelligent, what would we call it?
To call anything running on a computer today "intelligent" is to undermine the word itself. You might as well call a rock an airplane.
I didn't realize "intelligent" had such a clear definition that you could really say anything meaningful about whether a machine was "intelligent" or not.
If we (erroneously) call what occurs today "intelligent", then if something ever really did become intelligent, what would we call it?
I don't know.. perhaps we'd make a bit of progress and realize that "intelligence" isn't some nice single concept to just nail down like mass that we can all agree on what is is and isn't. We might even come up with 10 very different words to describe something we might now use the word intelligence about, since we might actually have a better grasp on what it actually is. If you ask me, intelligence is more about human ego than any real hard definitions. In many peoples minds computers can never be intelligent because it would bring our self opinions down a notch or two. That's why many people were sooo upset about Kasparov getting schooled by Deep Blue 10+ years ago, and then made up a bunch of excuses why it wasn't fair.
Whether a machine "intelligently" plays Chess, or is "intelligent" is a stupid question. What's more interesting is how we might accomplish the same task in different ways than our brains might do so. 40 years ago nobody ever thought a computer could be programmed to play even a decent game of chess. These days it's surpassed us. I think that says more about what we think is "intelligent" than anything else.
AccountKiller
As humans, we do exactly what physics mandates we do. Unless you're purporting that the human brain uses some sort of hypercomputation or that there's something special (ie outside of our current understanding of physics) about what neurons do, you're not being consistent.
That said, I understand where you're coming from; most AI research is in very narrow domains and has no intention or hopes of solving the problem of achieving human-level intelligence (Watson is an example of narrow AI, as it clearly lacks a genuine understanding of the question or the english language). But the fact remains, that is how the term AI is used.
There's a growing separation between this "Narrow AI" and the kind of AI you seem to be hoping for, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). There are some AGI projects out there, such as the open source opencog. Since there's no hope of people stopping calling things like computer chess AI, I prefer to use the term AGI whenever referencing "real" AI.
To shorten your post: AIs will exist when a computer can write code for itself to run without interaction from a user. Given a problem, and having no prior knowledge of a solution, nor a way to arrive at the solution, an AI will be capable of creating a set of instructions to solve that problem.
Against a programmer, oh, and an algorithm, both with a PhD....
-Weird Al Parodied
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
It's impossible to fully all possible games of chess. The game tree complexity is about 10^123, whereas the number of atoms in the universe is thought to be somewhere between 10^79 and 10^81. Thus, it's impossible to brute force the game since you can't store all the possible states.
If, however, we ignore this, then the answer to your question would be "it depends on how fast it could calculate the results." Some hypothetical computer with sufficient memory and a sufficiently fast processor would be unbeatable using a brute force algorithm by the definition of brute forcing. However, as already explained the "sufficient memory" part is pretty much impossible