Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.posted by pharm at 6:14 AM on February 17, 2011 [9 favorites]
So here's an idea I had. If you have a computer intelligent enough that this question is worth asking, you just turn it into a corporation and give it the functions of CEO and Chairman of the board. With the 14th amendment, that essentially gives it all rights guaranteed by the bill of rights, without any additional laws being passed.Corporations have the same rights as a person because they are composed of people, and you need one or two people to actually acquire a corporate charter anyway. So those people who owned stock, not the computer itself, would have the corporate rights. The computer would be the CEO, but the stockholders could fire or replace the CEO whenever they chose.
How much of it was structured, do we know? Cyc has been doing that for a long time and it didn't seem to be a useful strategy.Well, with Cyc they probably didn't have the CPU needed at the start. But how do we know Cyc doesn't work as well as watson does today? They would probably want to include unstructured data, not just a bunch of prolog.
No, I did not "miss" that. On the contrary, I'm well aware of it, and frankly, I think that you "missed a critical thing" about my point.The fixation on the buzzing -- not just here, mind you, but in virtually every discussion I've heard or seen on this topic -- is totally bizarre.Wow, you really missed a critical thing about Jeopardy. It doesn't matter whether or not you know the answer if you don't buzz in first.
I don't know, until google, it was pretty much impossible to get a decent response to a search query on the internet, and google doesn't do it nearly as well as watson does, with all the resources at their disposal.Okay, google doesn't have an entire computer room dedicated to solving each query individually. Even though google has a lot of resources, they don't (and can't) dedicate that much to each query. Maybe 10 years down the line. But if IBM tried to put Watson online, it just wouldn't be able to answer questions quickly enough.
I was not saying the buzzing is not relevant to winning a Jeopardy game. I was saying that the buzzing is not relevant to the core of the very impressive thing that was demonstrated here. Winning a Jeopardy game is a mere symptom of that core, not the core itself.But see that's the thing. It would have been impressive if they'd just shown how well the computer could answer questions. By adding an unfair advantage, they've actually tainted that, because people are now just saying, "He only won because he could push the button more quickly". And at the same time, it makes it seem like they weren't confident enough to have a fair competition.
A recent bestseller by Muriel Barbery is called this "of the Hedgehog"Returns "Elegance of the Hedgehog" as the first result. You might thing, Barbery + Hedgehog is easy. Let's try something more difficult:
You just need a little more sun! You don't have this hereditary lack of pigmentAgain, there's about three results containing the Jeopardy answer, but Albinism appears in the top-3 non-Jeopardy results.
I don't want to derail too much, but this is actually something I think about, and I believe it's a valid question/problem. IF we had a cure for cancer tomorrow, that cure WOULD worsen population problemsThe "population problems" are not caused by people in developed countries living too long. It's caused by poor people having large families. The "population problem" can be solved by making poor people not poor. Teaching them about birth control and giving women opportunities for careers that they put off childbirth for.
What unusual distinction is shared by these fictional characters, listed in this order? Gregory House M.D., Paul Bunyan, Fred Flintstone, Radar O'Reilly, Mulan, Voldemort, the Lone Ranger, Zeus, Ace Ventura, Cosmo Kramer, Superman, Oliver Wendell Douglas.Answer (rot13): Gurfr gjryir svpgvbany sbyxf rnpu bjarq crgf: erfcrpgviryl, n eng, na bk, n gvtre, n enoovg, n qentba, n fanxr, n ubefr, n enz, n zbaxrl, n ebbfgre, n qbt, naq n cvt. Va bgure jbeqf, gur gjryir navznyf bs gur Puvarfr mbqvnp!
Other people have been nicer in responding to you but I will be blunt: if this is what you really think you have an amazingly poor grasp of what music actually is, its complex role in society(ies), and the amount of consideration, ritual, emotion, complexity and meaning that it is imbued with in all of its incredible variety.Well this guy was able to write a computer program to emulate great composers, and people had trouble telling the difference. And this was on a mid-90s PC. Writing classical music isn't that much of a problem for a computer.
I would love to see how Watson would do on Jeopardy if it had read Conservapedia instead.what Watson knows, he got from "reading" things like Wikipedia.Phew, humans are safe after all.
DeepQA is a massively parallel probabilistic evidence-basedarchitecture. For the Jeopardy!Challenge, more than 100 differ-ent techniques are used to analyze natural language, identifysources, find and generate hypotheses, find and score evidence,and merge and rank hypotheses. Far more important than anyparticular technique is the way all these techniques are combinedin DeepQA such that overlapping approaches can bring theirstrengths to bear and contribute to improvements in accuracy,confidence, or speed.So IBM researchers wrote the annotators, I guess. But the actual lower level stuff to handle scaling up was based on open source software. (probably mostly written by IBM, but still)
...
DeepQA is developed using Apache UIMA, a framework implementation of the Unstructured Information ManagementArchitecture. UIMA was designed to support interoperabilityand scale-out of text and multimodal analysis applications. All ofthe components in DeepQA are implemented as UIMA annota-tors. These are components that analyze text and produce anno-tationsor assertions about the text. Over time Watson hasevolved so that the system now has hundred of components.UIMA facilitated rapid component integration, testing and evaluation.
It's another step on the way towards the goal of not requiring programmers to tell computers what to do.I hope you just left off the final clause of "entirely in an unambiguous artificial instruction language."
Nah, I bet some would be along the lines of "Why does Barry Soetoro hate America, Alex".I would love to see how Watson would do on Jeopardy if it had read Conservapedia instead.The answer to pretty much every question would be "What is magic, Alex."
The reason fascist societies are so often known for censoring art is that, like you, they thought they could understand human experience without regarding the soul, where by "soul" I really just mean "the complex wordless fabric of emotionality that even the greatest art can only briefly approximate."Okay this is just ridiculous. Look at any fascist society. Fascists love art. They like art that glorifies the state. It's specifically because they understand the power of art that they censor it. If they didn't think art was important, they wouldn't censor it.
Which leaves us in that "nirvana" when humans get to do really creative work all day. But putting aside economic considerations (are there really enough creative jobs to go around), this is a MASSIVE change. We don't have an education system that turns out creative people. (Most people who are creative are that way via luck and genes -- they're not helped much by their schooling.)In a lot of places, they still teach the old pencil and paper algorithms for solving arithmetic problems, instead of simpler methods and mathematical concepts using computers.
Watson does have a big advantage in this regard, since it can knock out a microsecond-precise buzz every single time with little or no variation. Human reflexes can't compete with computer circuits in this regard. But I wouldn't call this unfair...precise timing just happens to be one thing computers are better at than we humans. It's not like I think Watson should try buzzing in more erratically just to give homo sapiens a chance.(emphasis mine)
However, successful contestants know that you can't wait for the light, you have to anticipate when Alex will be done reading the clue. This implies that there is some slight delay between when the buzzers are unlocked and the light comes on.Interesting. The thing is, human being have about a 250ms reaction time. So even if they knew the answer, it would take them about 250ms. Presumably there's another 250ms delay from when the assistant activates the buzzers.
Not if we wanted to know the real question, can the computer find an answer to a question better than people can? We didn't require Deep Blue to pick up and move pieces around a chess board.But we didn't learn that from this either, because of the buzzer issue. All we learned is that the computer can answer pretty well, but push the button really fast
if you were just told that a person won $70,000 on jeopardy, would you assume that he was very smart or that he could push a button really fast?Well, now that I know more about jeopardy, I would have to conclude that they were both smart and quick at button pushing...
All we learned is that the computer can answer pretty well, but push the button really fastAll we learned is that US-backed Middle Eastern dictatorships can be overthrown nonviolently, and streets in Egypt sometimes have cars on them.
Well, I mean I work at an ISP, and 90% of what I do is react to tickets automatically generated by hardware telling me what their state is -- My fan is broken, and now i'm hot, and now i'm shutting down an interfaces -- or i'm running out of memory, or I can't figure out how to get to pittsburg any more, those kinds of things.It's not necessarily communicating with the outside world. It may be issuing orders to its immune system.
I can go for days at work and never actually get a work assignment from an actual human being. In a sense, all our network has self consciousness, and communicates with the outside world to ensure its own health and well being.
Not trying to derail, but reading this conversation has left me with a significant question: "How is modeling consciousness helpful?"Here you go
(...)
So it's a real question (at least for this lay person): Why model consciousness?
In the final round, I made up ground against Watson by finding the first "Daily Double" clue, and all three of us began furiously hunting for the second one, which we knew was my only hope for catching Watson. (Daily Doubles aren't distributed randomly across the board; as Watson well knows, they're more likely to be in some places than others.)Why? Why don't they randomize with equal distribution?
Well, first of all, it's not known that distance is continuous, and in fact a lot of people claim that it's not - they claim that there's no such thing as a distance less than a Planck length. It's not clear to me that that claim is true, but I'm no physicist, and in any case the weaker idea that there's no way to measure distance less than a Planck length under the currently known laws of physics seems less objectionable to me, and that weaker idea would be enough to place a bound on the precision of distance as related to computation.If consciousness can't be modeled on a Turing machine, it would by definition be hypercomputation. As the Wikipedia article says, there are several different models of what such a thing might look like — one of them being computation with arbitrary-precision real numbers — but there is currently no reason to suspect that any of these idealizations correspond to phenomena in the real world.Isn't the real world itself one of those phenomena? As far as I know, and granted I might be wrong about this, there's no upper limit on the precision with which two objects might be distant from each other; so isn't that one such correspondence?
"The film features one hundred people, who each present the IBM achievement recorded in the year they were born. The film chronology flows from the oldest person to the youngest, offering a whirlwind history of the company and culminating with its prospects for the future. For more information, please visit www.ibm100.com."IBM really has had quite a hand in the development and evolution of technology in the world.
Guru Meditation #00000004, 0000AAC0"for n=1, 2, ...:
for each length-n string in lexicographic order:
if the string is a correct proof of Goldbach's Conjecture, write the string to the tape and halt
This program tests all possible strings, starting with the shortest, for being correct proofs of Goldbach's Conjecture, that "all even numbers greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two prime numbers". If there is any proof, the program halts, with the theorem left on the machine's tape. If there is no proof, then the program does not halt. Most strings aren't even in the right form to be a proof, such as WHAT IS LEG. Most of those that are in the form of proofs will contain incorrect steps such as deducing A given A→B and B, the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Most of those correct proofs that remain will prove things other than the Goldbach Conjecture—for instance, that 0*0=0—but our TM is patient and verifying that a string is a correct proof is no trouble for a patient machine—it's all just symbol manipulation. If there is a proof of the conjecture, this program will ultimately give us the shortest one. It'll have to be a patient computer; the non-proof WHAT IS LEG will only pop up after around after 1028 other strings, and I'd be willing to bet that any proof of Goldbach's conjecture would be significantly longer than that.for n=1, 2, ...:
for each length-n string in lexicographic order:
if the string is a correct proof of Goldbach's Conjecture, write the string to the tape and halt
if the string is a correct proof of the negation of Goldbach's Conjecture, write the string to the tape and halt
(the program does not halt if Goldbach's Conjecture is logically independent of arithmetic, as the Axiom of Choice is logically independent of ZF set theory)When given the clue, "Ambrose Bierce described this as a temporary insanity cured by marriage," Watson beat both congressmen to the buzzer, answering confidently, "What is love?"Oh God, it's even more powerful than I dared imagine! WE'RE DOOMED.
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posted by HostBryan at 12:37 AM on February 17, 2011 [2 favorites]