On Tue, Feb 12, 2013  Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:

> >> So if Watson isn't intelligent he's something better than intelligent.
>
> > It is competent in jeopardy.
>

And the enormously impressive thing about Watson is that unlike Chess
Jeopardy is not a specialized game, you could get asked about anything from
cosmology to cosmetology. And even if the language used to communicate with
Watson is far more convoluted than everyday speech and is full of analogies
poetic allusions and even very bad puns Watson can still figure out what
information you desire and then provide it.

> just today news was released that Watson is well on its way at becoming
>> better than human doctors at diagnosing disease.
>>
>>
>> http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/ibm-watson-helps-doctors-fight-cancer/240148236
>
>

> > Making it competent in that domain.
>

How many domains does something need to have genius level competence in
before you admit it's pretty damn smart? Even human polymaths, those who
are a genius at everything have gone extinct. In the days of Leonardo da
Vinci one smart man could know all the science and mathematics that there
was in the world to know, but that stopped being possible about 200 years
ago. Today humans need to specialize, the best even the brightest among us
can hope for is to be a genius in one domain, be pretty good in another,
know a little bit about 2 or 3 others, and be almost clueless about
everything else.

> I can beat Watson in chess.
>

I doubt that very very much.

> Watson, if I remember correctly, is  competent in Jeopardy, and only in
> Jeopardy.
>

Bruno, Deep Blue beat the world human chess champion and it required a
supercomputer to do so, but that was 16 years ago and Moore's law marches
on; I don't know what sort of computer your typed you post on but by 1997
standards it is almost certainly a supercomputer, probably the most
powerful supercomputer in the world. I'll wager it would take you less than
five minutes to find and download a free chess playing program on the
internet that if run on the very machine you're writing your posts on that
would beat the hell out of you. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Watson
had a sub sub sub routine that enabled it to play Chess at least as well as
Depp Blue, after all you never know when the subject of Jeopardy will turn
out to be Chess. And if Watson didn't already have this capability it could
be added at virtually no cost.


> > I have no doubt that Watson is quite competent, but I don't see any of
> its behavior as reflecting intelligence.
>

If a person did half of what Watson did you would not hesitate for one
second in calling him intelligent, but Watson is made of silicon not carbon
so you don't.

> Intelligence, like consciousness, cannot be judged by others
>

That is ridiculous, I'll bet you personally have made that judgement at
least 10 times a day every single day of your life.

  John K Clark

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