Hi John,
On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 7:53 PM, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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. > They operate in two completely different domains (min-max trees vs. semantic networks) and they are both highly specialised for their respective domains. > 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? > It's not the number of domains, it's the potential to learn to operate in new ones. So far, nobody has been able to figure out a learning algorithm as generic as the one our brains contains. > 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, > Some think that specialisation is for insects. Nobody "needs' to do anything except to conform to some social norm. I see the benefits of specialisation (beyond being able to secure a job, which is a good part of it), but there is definitely room for generalists. > 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. > But they can chose which ones along the way. Intuitively, Einstein might have been a great scientist in any field. Watson and Deep Blue cannot change their minds and chose something 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; > Sort of. Now it's progressing due to multi-core architectures, which one could consider cheating because algorithm parallelisation is frequently non-trivial. > 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, > Maybe (although I believe you're underestimating the complexity of a good chess program). But can Watson, for example, introspect on the chess game and update his view of the world accordingly? Can he read a new text and figure out how to play better? I'm not saying that these things are impossible, just that they haven't been achieved yet. > 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. > But could you ask Watson to go and learn by himself? Because you could ask that of a person. Or to go and learn to fish. > > >> > 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. > Nor for another second in considering him/her profoundly autistic. Telmo. > > > 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 > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. 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