The thinking PC By Ariana Eunjung Cha September 21 2002 Icon If you ran into him online, you might first be struck by the kid's prodigious memory. He calls himself "SmarterChild" and can recite a litany of facts - this season's entire baseball line-up, every word in the dictionary, and the weather in major cities across the country. But other queries provoke odd responses. A question about SmarterChild's age returns, "One year, one month, 11 days, 16 hours, 7 minutes, 47 seconds!" Asking where he lives gets, "In a clean room at a high-tech hosting facility in California". SmarterChild, a computer program, is part of a new species of "chatterbots" that are renewing debate about the extent to which computers can achieve intelligence. The electronic personalities of this generation use the vast repository of information on the World Wide Web as their memory bank, not just some rigid database. To answer questions about baseball, for instance, SmarterChild scours the Web site of SportsTicker Enterprises LP; for spelling, it goes to the American Heritage Dictionary online; for the weather, it visits Intellicast.com. The company that conceived SmarterChild, Active Buddy Inc., created the bot as a marketing tool that would engage people in conversation and then tell them about various products or services. Built by engineer Timothy Kay, SmarterChild began popping up in instant messaging systems mid-last year. Since then, close to nine million people have talked to him. Chatterbots, which converse with people through real-time text messages, have existed on the Net for years. They are basically databases that link typical questions to stock responses. SmarterChild is different. Its database is limited only by the reach of the Web. Scientists are beginning to capitalise on the way the global network converts "knowledge," or at least reams of data, into a digital language computers can understand. Other companies have begun using chatterbots to help with customer service or Web searching. Eventually, however, some believe that technicians will be able to turn programs such as SmarterChild into more intelligent systems. That is, the network will naturally begin to evolve into a sort of global brain, one made up of the roughly 1 billion computers comprising the Internet. MORE http://smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/20/1032054954201.html Look out LA.
