These both sound really cool, and as a workaholic who never turns on a television and only leaves the house once a week (to take out the trash) I had not heard of them before.
On 12/16/2010 11:10 AM, Jed Rothwell wrote: > Artificial intelligence was predicted as early as the 1950s but little > progress was made until recently. As everyone knows, computers remain > only about as smart as ants. But I think we are finally seeing the > rise of something similar to artificial intelligence. I think a better > word for it would be substitute intelligence or synthetic machine > intelligence. Two examples have been in the news lately: > > 1. The autonomous automobile that can drive in normal California > traffic. This came far sooner than most experts predicted, I believe. Do you have a link on this one? I googled for it and didn't turn anything up (maybe I misspelled California or something...) > > 2. The IBM Watson computer that will soon compete on the television > Jeopardy game show. That sounds frivolous but the actual performance > of this computer is astounding to me. It is much more impressive than > the chess playing computer that won the world championship some years > ago. I was expecting that all along, whereas Watson's capabilities are > unlike any previous generation of computers. When something like this > can be used in place of today's primitive Google searches it may have > a large impact on society. If you've got a link on this one, I'd appreciate that, as well! > > There has also been progress in things like machine translation at the > Google site, but this is not as radical where is unexpected as these > two. Google's machine translation capabilities are partly from > synthetic intelligence, but they are augmented or improved by > corrections and suggestions made by bilingual people. There is place > to "suggest a better translation." That is a fine method but it is not > revolutionary. > > - Jed >
