IBM Engineer Builds a Harry Potter Sorting Hat Using 'Watson' AI (thenextweb.com)

An anonymous reader writes: As America celebrates Father's Day, The Next Web reports on an IBM engineer who found a way to combine his daughters' interest in the Harry Potter series with an educational home technology project. Together they built a Hogwarts-style sorting hat -- which assigns its wearer into an appropriate residence house at the school of magic -- and it does it using IBM's cognitive computing platform Watson. "The hat uses Watson's Natural Language Classifier and Speech to Text to let the wearer simply talk to the hat, then be sorted according to what he or she says..." reports The Next Web. "Anderson coded the hat to pick up on words that fit the characteristics of each Hogwarts house, with brainy and cleverness going right into Ravenclaw's territory and honesty a recognized Hufflepuff attribute."
The hat's algorithm would place Stephen Hawking and Hillary Clinton into Ravenclaw, according to the article, while Donald Trump "was assigned to Gryffindor for his boldness -- but only with a 48 percent certainty."

The sorting hat talks, drawing its data directly from the IBM Cloud, and if you're interested in building your own, the IBM engineer has shared a tutorial online.

Comments

You're an idiot

[Okian Warrior]

A plan must be actionable to be a plan. His fantasy is not a plan. Actionable in the sense of possessing a legal method for implementation, including checks and balances from other branches of government and the whole messy issue of constitutionality.

This is why I despair of any intelligent conversation on this board.

Your blind obeisance to electing Hillary let's you say any damn thing you like, so long as it furthers your goal.

Her plan explicitly states that she will, in her own words, "Defend President Obama’s executive actions", widely recognized as making up legislation out of whole cloth, and explicitly contrary to existing legislation. (And 25 states sued to block him on it.)

You people keep pointing out how often Trump lies to the people, here's a perfect example of the lies that Clinton's supporters tell to the people.

The difference being, her lie will put millions of legitimate citizens out of a job.

You're an idiot.

And a coward.

Probably a paid blogger for the Clinton campaign.

Propaganda

[zapadnik]

Do Slashdotters really not see the propaganda? whether you agree with Trump or Clinton or not is irrelevant, the fact that this article slips a political issue into an otherwise cool article about tech demonstrates how good propagandists are today, and how few people can spot it. C'mon Slashdotters, over 80% of propaganda is camouflaged in "entertainment". This is how you get fed with memes that make you have an emotional (that is to say, irrational) reaction without ever understanding the facts on any issue.

Once you take the Red Pill you can see the memes the propagandists use on each side. Articles are merely the false mustache that propagandists put on to disguise their payloads. Once you understand the favored memes of those that control the media, and those that edit it, you can see the strands of The Matrix designed to control you - without you ever thinking about the messages you are being bombarded with.

Everyone keeps looking for propagandists as guys with funny mustaches in snazzy uniforms - but modern propaganda is so much more advanced than that. The best propaganda is so good that people cannot even see it because they think it is "normal". Try watching movies or reading a newspaper and look at what information was hinted at, and even more importantly, what information was omitted. When you do this you can see how consistent the messages that are being pumped out are It is truly astounding when you finally see it.

If you can't yet see it dear Slashdotters it is not because it doesn't exist - it is like an optical illusion that your mind has to expand to see both ways. If you're not seeing the propaganda in this article (and thousands of others) yet then you just need to train your mind - and once you see it, you see it is so pervasive it is clearly not accidental.

Understand we are not headed for 1984, we are in 1984, and the reason we remain there is because most people not only cannot see the memes that control them, they do not want to see them.