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Humanity is closing in on building machines to pass the Turing Test. Watson beat both champs in the demo round a few weeks ago and I fully expect him - yes, him

• JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior. We have no more to fear from it, than from a punch and judy show. Cleverer and cleverer puppets will not become intelligent machines. A dedicated effort to build a massive neural cluster simulation might become intelligent, but it will think such incomprehensible thoughts as to be fairly useless to us (think intelligent rhododendon; what would you have to talk about?) We will know when Watson is dangerous when it feels fear, angst, want. Not just an algorithm to sort facts and simulate speech.
  • cryptoz 16y ago
    Watson is not a simulation any more than your brain is a simulation. Your brain is (likely) mostly just algorithms and data structures, albeit on an enormous scale. This could be wrong, but I'm betting not. What else could the brain possibly be? It's not magic. > We will know when Watson is dangerous when it feels fear, angst, want. Not just an algorithm to sort facts and simulate speech. Nah. Look at good science fiction to see why this is false. The most dangerous AI ever conceived might be something like Skynet or HAL 9000; machines that are cold, calculating and have no emotion whatsoever. But they do hold weapons, they do speak English and they are intelligent. I'm not suggesting we'll ever build anything like what we see in science fiction, but good writers often are able to predict - or even influence (see Clark, Asimov) - the future. Algorithms to sort facts are indeed the beginnings of machine intelligence.
    • JoeAltmaier 16y ago
      I deny that the human brain IS algorithms. It is neurons connected by dendrons/synapses. Right? Small bits of it can be algorithmically simulated. Large processes can be algorithmically simulated. But to call the algorithm "intelligence" is sympathetic magic. Algorithms work in a different way; they break in a different way; they are hard-coded so don't change. They are a simulation.
      • kls 16y ago
        No disrespect intended but, I think you are lacking a fundamental understanding of machine learning, genetic algorithms, neural networks and AI in general. I was introduced to Watson when I took a sub-project from IBM related to Watson, I had no idea what it was untill taking the contract, at which point I was introduced to Watson and it is an impressive feat, it is with out a doubt the state of the art in NLP AI. Sufficient to say, AI algorithms differ from the static and rigged structures that most developers write for business apps, web or mobile apps (even the good developers that decouple stuff), the scale of difference is orders of magnitude. In many cases machines learning has the ability to generate new code based on learning and build new connections and new algorithms to deal with learned problems. Applications literally generate new and novel applications and then connect themselves to these new nodes. This is not stuff usually broached when you just need to credit a line in an account payable or get the sales volume for last month. There is a huge gap between the code used to write business applications and the structures used in AI. This is not meant as a critique of you or anyone in general, and is not intend to belittle business app, mobile or web developers but rather to help inform people that, those who have not worked in the field of AI, that their understanding of software development has little relevance when applied to the field of AI. It is literally a different world where the concepts are totally foreign to a non-AI developer.
        • arethuza 16y ago
          I think anyone who has worked in the field of AI would admit there are a lot of philosophical questions around the definition of intelligence and it's relationship to algorithmic problem solving. One of my favourite thought experiments in the area being Searle's Chinese Room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
  • ugh 16y ago
    A simulation of what? It can actually answer Jeopardy questions. As good or better than the best Jeopardy player on the planet. (We will see.) Another task, previously only conquered by evolution, now conquered by algorithms written by humans. Watson doesn’t pretend to be good at Jeopardy, it just is.
    • JoeAltmaier 16y ago
      It can simulate an intelligence answering Jeopardy questions.
      • ugh 16y ago
        It actually answers questions, no trickery involved. It might not use the same algorithms humans use to answer those questions but that isn’t really that important, nobody ever claimed it does. I don’t see the simulation. I see a machine that is genuinely good at playing Jeopardy.
    • gjm11 16y ago
      > Another task, previously only conquered by evolution I'm pretty sure that Jeopardy performance as such has not been strongly selected for among the ancestors of present day H. sapiens. (And the related things that may have been -- effective language use, good memory, etc. -- are not so obviously "conquered by algorithms written by humans" however well Watson does.)
      • ugh 16y ago
        That sentence was written for its poetic impact, not its accuracy, I think it’s nevertheless somewhat defensible. Humans were obviously never selected for playing Jeopardy and evolution didn’t in that sense “conquer” Jeopardy (like dinosaurs “conquering” flying) but evolution nevertheless produced humans which are very good at playing Jeopardy. (We know of nothing else in this universe that can even only understand the rules of Jeopardy. Except for human-built machines.) That we can build a machine which is just as good as we are at playing the game obviously doesn’t mean that this machine is as intelligent as humans, it’s nevertheless quite impressive.
  • demallien 16y ago
    And how will we know that Watson actually feels fear, or will we just get someone else saying "Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior" response? Anyway, the answer to this type of conundrum is simple and well-known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test Of course it should be noted that we aren't there yet for Watson. Even in the restricted domain of a game show, when Watson fails, it does so with a different mode, compared to humans, so we can identify that it isn't actually a human.
    • mattmanser 16y ago
      Personally I don't think the answer is the turing test, it is a limited test of intelligence. There's also no guarantee we wouldn't be able to brute force it in time, just as deep blue was mere brute forcing. Impressive technologically, disappointing intellectually. When I think of intelligence I think of intuition, creativity, flexibility and the ability to learn. The turing test is a simple test along a long path. I don't think the answer of your conundrum is simple and well known.
      • demallien 16y ago
        You don't understand what the Turing Test is all about. It isn't testing intelligence, it is an attempt to answer the question "Can machines think?". It's all there in that Wikipedia link that I posted. Also, what makes you think that what goes on in your own brain isn't just another form of "brute-forcing"? What makes one implementation of thinking "thinking" and another form just "brute-force"? And then, brute-forcing is the technique of trying every possible solution - a Turing Machine must be able to move in a near infinite solution space, so brute-forcing is not actually possible.
        • Qz 16y ago
          It's really more like "Can we fool ourselves into believing that machines think?" which isn't actually any different from the question "Can we fool ourselves into believing other people think?"
        • 16y ago
  • adsr 16y ago
    I agree about the simulation part, does it have a sense of self? Or can pose questions to itself such as "I think therefore I am"?
• rst 16y ago
  To seem to me like a person, Watson would need more than intelligence, it would need, well... personality. Watson will answer questions put to it for as long as the power is on. But it will never do anything else. It has no other desires, no motives, no interests. Its planning skills are limited to game strategy. Its conversational skills are limited to preprogrammed social niceties which probably don't extend beyond the context of the game. You can make a decent case that it's intelligent --- but it's an intelligent machine. You'd have to add all of the above, and probably more, in order to get something that you could interact with even on-line as a person. [EDIT: I don't mean to deny the possibility of a machine that I would feel comfortable calling a person --- but I saw the Watson demo run, and I haven't seen one yet.]
• baddox 16y ago
  The thing is, Jeopardy! at a high level of competition boils down to reflexes. Obviously it's very impressive that Watson would even be able to generate correct responses a significant portion of the time, but you must realize that the two human contestants probably knew more correct responses that Watson. In the practice video, you saw Ken take off on the book titles category, probably because Watson couldn't handle the language of those clues.
• mechanical_fish 16y ago
  Watson is amazing, but I've known for years that it was coming. You just have to look at Google and Wikipedia to know that it was coming. Because answering trivia questions is just not the equivalent of passing the Turing test. Trivia questions are quite guessable. I played a lot of College Bowl (and its local high-school equivalent) back in my younger days. And there were many running gags about the strategy. For example, if a question contained the words "Name this artist..." there was a strictly limited set of possible answers, defined roughly as "artists whose names appear in a typical high school art appreciation class". Similarly, "name this composer" is more likely to be cluing Beethoven or Bach or Mozart than Grieg or Saint-Saens, and almost certainly not anybody more obscure than that. And Grieg is not that obscure. There were a lot of common themes: It was a good idea to memorize the names of all the Greek, Roman, and Norse gods; the names of all the types of clouds; the capitals of countries and the names of political leaders. That sort of thing. In College Bowl (unlike Jeopardy) it is legal to press the buzzer and interrupt the questioner at any point. The questioner just stops reading until you've taken your guess. And so every College Bowl geek knows a story like this: Someone accidentally presses the buzzer before the person reading the questions has said more than one or two words. So, with nothing else to do but guess, the player shouts something out. And that guess is correct. I've never seen a zero-word guess work in person, but I've seen a few two and three-word guesses succeed. Given just a hint of the topic ("this scientist...") the odds are surprisingly good. The search space is just not that large. One reason why trivia is easy is that questions that require even the smallest amount of actual thought tend to be too ambiguous for good trivia. Trivia questions are generally read, answered, and judged by people who have no actual expertise in their subject matter, so it's important that the answers be very clear and unambiguous. I used to dread the physics questions, because I was a student physicist, and I understood the questions too well. So it was sometimes difficult to avoid giving answers that were technically correct, but that did not match the one on the card.
  • andrewce 16y ago
    My college didn't have a college bowl team, but competing on high school teams and being responsible for more than a few correct two or three word answers, I can vouch for this. It's all about having enough breadth that the other bits of information presented can help whittle down answers by way of association and relationships. Good trivia players rely quite a bit on intuition. Ken Jennings mentioned (in his book) how Jeopardy! often has questions about rivers, so it was a fairly simple matter to just memorize river names and some basic associations with which to answer questions. It seems like Watson is mostly a really sophisticated algorithm on top of lots of brute force (2880 processors?!). Though I guess it could also be said that humans are just ugly bags of mostly water. That said: in something like medicine (differential diagnoses), such a system could also be extremely useful, given the frequent occurrence of a fairly limited number of "answers".
• bioh42_2 16y ago
  This sends chills down my spine. Allow me to rephrase that: Eventually the machine will better diagnose your symptoms. More accurately then a human doctor could.
  • mkramlich 16y ago
    Let's see... Start with UMV technology. Add human image recognition systems, natural language processing and speech synthesis, expert system-based medical diagnosis, and, say, a built-in weapons system. I'll be in my bunker.
• TheCondor 16y ago
  Watson is completely amazing. The differences between Jeopardy and chess are staggering. I'd even say that in the chess challenge, they could kind of cheat, Deep Blue had every 5 piece board configuration in a book and so if it could play to 5 pieces left then it knew how to play from there, humans have their look up optimized differently. If this technology can be generally applied, it just seems like a radical tool, radical for medicine, law, and probably revolutionary for other professions where access to information hasn't been as important. That being said, a really really clever jeopardy playing machine just doesn't seem "intelligent" to me. Huge bounds forward, we're making progress, I'm not denying that but Watson isn't going to slurp in the works of Shakespeare and write down some original thoughts on it, comparing it to current events. Or contrast Wordsworth and Keats. Or suggest a new experiment to further identify envelope proteins on a virus. Or invent a new way to etch semiconductors even smaller than we currently are. Will we get there? Maybe, hopefully, maybe even in our life times, but this is comprehension and search, it's not inventing or creating yet. It seems like half the problem, maybe the easier half. Still awesome, maybe in a few years we'll have Watsons we can access from our phones or something.