Hi everyone and Happy Valentine's Day!
I have a couple of really interesting articles here in the blog today - this has been an interesting week from a science and technology point of view.
Any Jeopardy fans out there? Tonight begins the latest Jeopardy Challenge with the two greatest Jeopardy champions of all time taking on Watson, a specially designed computer which plays the game. This is a much bigger challenge that simply playing chess because Jeopardy questions are contextual, nuanced and often include puns. The background to this effort on the part of IBM is explored in the PBS NOVA show The Smartest Machine on Earth: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth.html
The tricky thing is modeling a vast data set to look for reliable patterns which allow the computer to connect the question to the correct answer.
Second up is an article in The Economist on Three Dimensional printing as a form of manufacturing. They can now print anything from titanium aircraft parts down to complete grandfather clocks which work perfectly right out of the printer. Manufacturing costs will come down, wasted materials will vanish and they are doing this today: http://www.economist.com/node/18114327
A Valentine's present from NASA. A few years back, a spacecraft named Deep Impact sent a perpetrator probe to impact with a comet called Temple-1 and then photographed the entire thing. The one thing they weren't able to photograph as the crater created - too much dust and gas generated by the impact. Tonight, a second spacecraft named Stardust, which has already returned samples from the coma of another comet, has been re-purposed to fly by Temple-1 and see if it can spot the crater. I know what I will be watching on NASA TV at 11:30 PM!
http://stardustnext.jpl.nasa.gov/
We live in interesting times and that is a good thing!
Be brave.
Paul
Ok, I'll bite on the first one. I watched Jeopardy last night (accidentally came home early, didn't know what to do) and thought it was pretty cool until the final question.
ReplyDeleteWTF? Nerves? Watson choked? Was it a gimme to give Canadian props to Alex?
I'm no AI guy but like any developer have had to build some complex validation or logic trees. Have toyed with how to approx something that would mimic human thought.
"The final category was US Cities The Clue was: The largest Airport is named for a World War II Hero; it's second largest for a World War II Battle The answer was: What is Chicago"
So, if Watson has umpteen parallel logic buckets working on the different aspects of the question how did it miss the big clue of "US Cities"? How does "Toronto" match any airport? Ok, the island airport is renamed for Billy Bishop a WW1 hero but come on....
I'm going to find out this is some sort of secret, clever science, history thing that only smart, clever developers know about aren't I?
I'm never coming home early again.
e