2009/10/24 Dave Dyer <dd...@real-me.net>: > At 10:12 AM 10/24/2009, Joshua Shriver wrote: > > Came across this today, and since this is also an AI oriented list thought > some of you might enjoy it too. > > http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/future-tech/the-past-present-and-future-of-ai-643838 > > I won't believe it even if I see it. Google "Mechanical Turk" >
I heard about this a few months ago. My first thought was similar, seeing is believing. From what I read about it it's a system only built to play Jeopardy and specifically tailored to produce answers in this fashion. So that narrows the scope quite a bit from actual natural language understanding. And this article's author either didn't understand it or is being disingenuous. Because it was built to play Jeopardy from the start, it's not at all that its language understanding is so good they decided to let it play the game to see how well it would do. This kind of twisting of the truth just raises more doubts with me. Having said all that, if the program can do even remotely what they claim it can do it would already be a big advancement. It just so happens I'm allergic to hype. The article also mentions Jabberwacky. For my project I have looked at quite a few chat-bots, including Jabberwacky. I didn't feel it stood out from all the other main ones. And all have a very artificial feel a few sentences into a conversation. We have a custom-made chat-bot that was made by Bruce Wilcox (yes, the world is small) and I think it's on par with the most famous ones. It suffers from the same shortcomings in that it doesn't really understand what it's talking about. Humans can be fooled by them for a little bit, but it soon becomes very artificial because of a lack of understanding and lack of the most basic logic. Progress is being made. But very, very slowly. Where it says "The Watson project isn't a million miles from the fictional HAL project" I'm afraid that is not a million miles indeed but a billion miles. Mark _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
