All said and done the mind that makes machines is always Superior.
Story:
Plenty of observers have weighed in onWatson, the computer that International Business Machines Corp. built and programmed to play the quiz show “Jeopardy!” Few have done it better than Stephen Baker, author of “Final Jeopardy: Man vs. Machine and the Quest to Know Everything.”
Baker, formerly the senior technology writer for Businessweek, got behind the scenes atArmonk, New York-based IBM to watch a team of scientists and engineers create a machine to compete in Sony Corp.’s beloved half-hour nerd-fest of answers and questions hosted by Alex Trebek.
Adding to the challenge was one of the computer’s flesh- and-blood opponents: Ken Jennings, the Joe DiMaggio of “Jeopardy!” who won a record 74 straight matches.
David Ferrucci, the chief scientist on the team that developed Watson — named for IBM’s founder — understood that no matter how fast the machine was, or how many facts they crammed into its database, humans like Jennings still possessed skills no one had been able to engineer with much success.
“Any ‘Jeopardy’ machine they built would struggle mightily to master language and common sense — areas that come as naturally to humans as breathing,” Baker writes. “On the positive side, it wouldn’t suffer from nerves.”
Baker goes easy on the hard science behind Watson, referring readers to scholarly journals for technological details. Even his description of the hardware makes the technical tangible:
Leaning Towers
“The eight towers, each the size of a restaurant refrigerator, carried scores of computers on horizontal shelves, each about as big as a pizza box. The towers were tilted, like the one in Pisa, giving them more surface area for cooling.”
Instead, he plays up the skirmishes that break out at the border between person and processor. The most engaging chapter focuses on the controversy the Watson project sparked in the artificial-intelligence community.
Some scientists feared Watson would draw attention, and funding, away from their efforts to create machines that mimic human thought, a complex and not fully understood process.
“The world would see, and perhaps fall in love with, a machine that only simulated intelligence,” Baker writes. “The machine was too dumb, too ignorant, too famous, and too rich. (In that sense, IBM’s computer resembled lots of other television stars.)”
.
No comments:
Post a Comment