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8 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
Philip Glass. The compositions would get a reasonable technical score in
an exam, better than many of my attempts, but are these compositions
truly art?
There's no question computers are gaining ground on us in certain
mathematically oriented tasks — playing chess, musical composition, and
various modeling tasks. But attempts to have them work with words and
ideas have generally produced dismal results. Until now.
In 2008, IBM unveiled Watson: a computer capable of answering
general knowledge questions. Watson has an enormous database of
human knowledge: the Encyclopedia Britannica, a billion web pages,
the entire text of Wikipedia and millions of books. It uses artificial
intelligence to trawl through this vast reservoir of knowledge and answer
questions using a statistical approach. In 2011, Watson featured as a
contestant on Jeopardy, the American quiz show, where it beat the two
record-holding contestants — the one with the highest number of wins
and the one with most consecutive wins. Let me give you a few sample
questions and see how you fare.
Question 1. It can mean to develop
gradually in the mind or to
carry during pregnancy.
Question 2. William Wilkinson's “An
Account of the Principalities
of Wallachia and Moldavia”
inspired this author's most
famous Novel.
Question 3. __Its largest airport is named
for a World War II hero; its
second largest, for a World
War II battle.
Watson answered questions one and two correctly but failed on
question three. You can probably see the final question is posed in poorly
structured English and this threw off Watson’s comprehension algorithm.
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