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Opening Arguments

Let there be light

I am both a huge "Jeopardy!" fan and a science fiction reader who has wondered a lot about artificial intelligence and the singularity. So it couldn't be anything but Must See TV for me on Feb. 14, 15 and 16, when the two best "Jeopardy!" champions of all time are taken on by IBM's supercomputer, Watson. What is involved in Watson being able to compete is remarkable:

Consider the challenge: Watson will have to be ready to identify anything under the sun, answering all manner of coy, sly, slant, esoteric, ambiguous questions ranging from the “Rh factor” of Scarlett's favorite Butler or the 19th-century painter whose name means “police officer” to the rhyme-time place where Peléstores his ball or what you get when you cross a typical day in the life of the Beatles witha crazed zombie classic. And he (forgive me) will have to buzz in fast enough and with sufficient confidence to beat Ken Jennings, the holder of the longest unbroken “Jeopardy!” winning streak, and Brad Rutter, an undefeated champion and the game's biggest money winner. The machine's one great edge: Watson has no idea that he should be panicking.

Open-domain question answering has long been one of the great holy grails of artificial intelligence. It is considerably harder to formalize than chess. It goes well beyond what search engines like Google do when they comb data for keywords. Google can give you 300,000 page matches for a search of the terms “greyhound,” “origin” and “African country,” which you can then comb through at your leisure to find what you need.

 Asked in what African country the greyhound originated, Watson can tell you in a couple of seconds that the authoritative consensus favors Egypt. But to stand a chance of defeating Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter, Watson will have to be able to beat them to the buzzer at least half the time and answer with something like 90 percent accuracy.

We are getting very close to something both exhilarating and very scary. The uses for machines like Watson are nearly limitless. We are drowning in data that we have trouble converting into useful information, let alone knowledge. Imagine machines that know everything and can answer almost any question with almost 100 percent reliability.

But as the machines get smarter and smarter, will they stop being our tools and become something else? Where does consciousness begin? If you cram enough information into a computer, will self-awareness be sparked? Author Ray Kurzwell ("The Singularity Is Near") thinks the Watson match will be a milestone in the progression of machines to achieving human intelligence.

Today, he observed how a computer, IBM's Deep Blue, beat the world's reigning chess champion, Gary Kasparov, in 1997. However, for a computer, chess is child's play compared to the challenge of a game show such as Jeopardy, Kurzweil says. “This threshold is going to be harder to dismiss,” he explains. “What people have emphasized, and I've agreed, that the key to human intelligence is really mastering the subtleties of human language

Comments

larry morris
Thu, 02/10/2011 - 5:39pm

I will be right there watching also. I have not kept up on this aspect of computer technology, so it will be interesting to see how far they have come - I will be surprised if it does as well as they think - who knows, perhaps one day they will even take over my job :-)

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