IBM AI wins jeopardy round, badguys ftw, and curbing misbehavior online

[steele_the_wolf]

IBMs AI "Watson" wins Jeopardy practice round against human champions.  This is pretty fucking sweet.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/13/ibms-watson-supercomputer-destroys-all-humans-in-jeopardy-pract/

More promo videos of it here and here.

And I was beginning to think their wasn't any decent advances in AI recently.  Now we are truly beginning to

Comments

[schnee]

Watson is very interesting, but I'd not proclaim it an advance in AI, myself.

That Cracked article is very interesting, too. I've always felt that the hyenas on The Lion King were portrayed unfairly: but then, hyenas in general are. (Just ask random people about the roles of hyenas and lions in the ecosystem, and quite a few will likely tell you that lions are the noble hunters that only eat what they just killed themselves, whereas hyenas only ever steal from weaker predators, or perhaps turn to scavenging. In reality, both hyenas and lions hunt, and both will steal and scavenge given the opportunity.)

It's got a good point about the Lord of the Rings, too, although there IS more of a backstory to that, of course, and Sauron did quite a lot of bad stuff in the first age (together with Melkor/Morgoth) and second age. The Lord of the Rings is overly simplistic and (honestly) outright racist in many instances, classifying entire races and peoples (e.g. humans from certain areas) as evil, but it's not like Sauron was just a guy who wanted freedom for his own folks and who staged a revolution that turned violent because that's what revolutions do. ;)

My own favorite Cracked article I've read so far is still this, though. :)

As for Riot's approach to dealing with idiocy... good luck to them; I could see this working, but I can also see it collapsing soon enough when people subvert the process intentionally (is there such a thing as judicial review there?), when people other than trolls stop participating (nobody likes jury duty in real life, either, right?), and when those that do participate let it get to their heads.

(Maybe I'm too cynical, of course.)

[weredog]

As a side note, the Disney people came to my job to study the hyenas for animating the Lion King. After the movie came out, several of the workers there were livid that they hyenas were portrayed as villains. I personally didn't take too much offense. Hyenas are asshole in person often times. They really do love to start trouble and fight.

[schnee]

*chuckles* Yeah, I suppose they can be that... but from what I've been told (and admittedly, if you work with hyenas for a living, you'll know much more about this than I do), they can be surprisingly curious and gentle, too.

[weredog]

Also, I'm waiting until more information comes out on how Watson was "trained", programmed, and several other little bits of info before I'll judge on it's AI. The leap of interface is unquestionable however. This is the future of how we will be interacting with computers.

Through all of it, you have to marvel at what they have done. The database action and interaction must be amazing. Nevermind that the thing has 2000 processing cores and terabytes of ram, it has brought a bit of science fiction, to science fact, and I think that is really cool. Maybe even a touch scary :)

Also, I wonder how mant FPS it will get in WOW and SL ? :O~~~

[schnee]

Quite a few, probably... I wonder if it'll eventually run Duke Nukem Forever, though. ^.^

And yeah, it certainly is amazing, no matter what. I'm just not sure whether AI (or, more precisely, "intelligence") is the right term.

[weredog]

True, but what will it ever take. As far as I know, what computers do will always be a product of the software they are running.

What exactly is intelligence? It's hard to define. Maybe when a single computer can do MANY of the tasks we all do everyday? Sure it can play Jeopardy, but can it figure out how drive a car?
:)

[schnee]

What exactly is intelligence?

That, of course, is the real question. :) Personally, I think intelligence is defined by the ability to adapt to new situations; a computer that can play Jeopardy and drive a car and so on isn't intelligent if that's what it was programmed to be able to do, but it might be if it's able to figure these things out on its own (which doesn't necessarily mean excelling at either).