Watson Wins Jeopardy

[chibivash]

not surprising really. robots dont' get tired and people do.

 

[Scorched_Cascade]

So we are building robots that win at trivia now? Yes its a fascinating achievement but I'm not worried until they make a robot that can create (not just replicate, recreate or duplicate) something like this:

 

[Toaster Hunter]

As a fan of Battlestar Galactica I can say that this will only end badly and I want to take this opportunity to say "I told you so." That will be all.

 

[Neuromaster]

Machines 1, Everything That Is Beautiful And Joyous In Our Flawed Human Condition 0.

Make that machines 2. Big Blue scored the first point.

Wait? What's that sound? Th---that's the Renaissance's music!

And Michelangelo Buonarotti and Leonardo DaVinci, the tag team champions of the world, have entered the ring! And they brought art! Spirituality! The ability to create entirely new ideas out of whole cloth with no pre-existing template from which to work!

And what's this? Look who's coming out of the tunnel!

It's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart! And he seems hell bent on showing computers that technical perfection is nothing if not tempered with the very soul of the gods themselves!

And it's Franz Schubert! Who in madness achieved the very height of 19th-century orchestral music!

And...what's this? Could it be? Yes! It's Johann Strauss! Bringing whimsy and mastery in equal measure to create music that makes even the most hardened soul want to get up and dance the waltz!

*opening strains to "Draco and Maria" begin to play*

And...my GODS! Nobuo Uematsu, using the power of the computer to cinch the victory for humanity!

*referee starts counting*

ONE! TWO! THREE!

Humanity WINS!

Uh-oh... [http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/]

 

[castlewise]

As an attendum the article also says:

On the night of the grand finale, IBM announced a research agreement with speech recognition firm Nuance Communications

Basically the IBM guys are huge Trekkies and want to build the enterprise computer. They need to give Watson a sex change first though.

 

[tahrey]

Machines 1, Everything That Is Beautiful And Joyous In Our Flawed Human Condition 0.

Make that machines 2. Big Blue scored the first point.

Wait? What's that sound? Th---that's the Renaissance's music!

And Michelangelo Buonarotti and Leonardo DaVinci, the tag team champions of the world, have entered the ring! And they brought art! Spirituality! The ability to create entirely new ideas out of whole cloth with no pre-existing template from which to work!

And what's this? Look who's coming out of the tunnel!

It's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart! And he seems hell bent on showing computers that technical perfection is nothing if not tempered with the very soul of the gods themselves!

And it's Franz Schubert! Who in madness achieved the very height of 19th-century orchestral music!

And...what's this? Could it be? Yes! It's Johann Strauss! Bringing whimsy and mastery in equal measure to create music that makes even the most hardened soul want to get up and dance the waltz!

*opening strains to "Draco and Maria" begin to play*

And...my GODS! Nobuo Uematsu, using the power of the computer to cinch the victory for humanity!

*referee starts counting*

ONE! TWO! THREE!

Humanity WINS!

I think I love you. How do you feel about children?

 

[tautologico]

Machines 1, Everything That Is Beautiful And Joyous In Our Flawed Human Condition 0.

Make that machines 2. Big Blue scored the first point.

Wait? What's that sound? Th---that's the Renaissance's music!

And Michelangelo Buonarotti and Leonardo DaVinci, the tag team champions of the world, have entered the ring! And they brought art! Spirituality! The ability to create entirely new ideas out of whole cloth with no pre-existing template from which to work!

And what's this? Look who's coming out of the tunnel!

It's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart! And he seems hell bent on showing computers that technical perfection is nothing if not tempered with the very soul of the gods themselves!

And it's Franz Schubert! Who in madness achieved the very height of 19th-century orchestral music!

And...what's this? Could it be? Yes! It's Johann Strauss! Bringing whimsy and mastery in equal measure to create music that makes even the most hardened soul want to get up and dance the waltz!

*opening strains to "Draco and Maria" begin to play*

And...my GODS! Nobuo Uematsu, using the power of the computer to cinch the victory for humanity!

*referee starts counting*

ONE! TWO! THREE!

Humanity WINS!

The machines can sense your fear.

EDIT: Also, we can train a computer to compose a piece of music in the style of any of these guys, and most people won't be able to tell it was composed by a machine. Unless you know the whole works of a composer by heart.

 

[SimuLord]

I think I love you. How do you feel about children?

There are laws against that sort of thing. Come back when you're 18.

(for what it's worth, I do plan to settle down and start a family. Still a year or two away at least, however.)

 

[Formica Archonis]

Machines 1, Everything That Is Beautiful And Joyous In Our Flawed Human Condition 0.

Make that machines 2. Big Blue scored the first point.

Deep Blue, actually. Descendant of the chess-playing computer Deep Thought. Big Blue is a slang term for IBM itself.

I watched it and I was interested in it. The robots are taking over the world. Slowly but surly Watson will become the robotic overlord.

Sadly, his plans will fail when he sends his Legions of Terror to take over the American city of Toronto and they get lost.

Honestly can't see how he could lose, they probably had to put a random "wait for others to hit the button" function otherwise he would just play by himself.

Surprisingly, no. Occasionally the onscreen "three best answers" list for Watson would change on the fly - that machine was going full tilt all the time. Most of the time a human beat it it was because it wasn't sure of the answer and was still trying to figure it out.

That computer is a total fa nerd. I would have kicked him down a flight of stairs.

Wow. I wanna see someone kick a server room down a flight of stairs now.

 

[Something Amyss]

I'm going to get worried once we start combining him with those robot arms and then give him kinect eyes.

Spoiler: The future is now!

Number Five is alive. And boy, is he pissed.

 

[ssgt splatter]

Somehow this doesn't surprise me. It's a computer for god's sake.

 

[Lucifron]

So we are building robots that win at trivia now? Yes its a fascinating achievement but I'm not worried until they make a robot that can create (not just replicate, recreate or duplicate) something like this:

Spoiler

Don't worry. I'm sure that we will get there.

 

[SimuLord]

EDIT: Also, we can train a computer to compose a piece of music in the style of any of these guys (Strauss/Mozart/Beethoven), and most people won't be able to tell it was composed by a machine. Unless you know the whole works of a composer by heart.

So what you're saying is that music is immune to the effect of the Uncanny Valley.

I don't doubt that we could train a computer to compose a work "in a given style", but the work itself will (to steal a line from Harry Chapin) "lack the range of total color necessary to make it consistently interesting." Just as a computer cannot generate a da Vinci by its ownself, nor can it master similar visual arts without being programmed with a template, so too can it not generate masterful orchestral music.

Sure, you might be able to teach a computer how to generate ear-scraping junk like Philip Glass, but that's not really an accomplishment. My three-year-old nephew whacking away at his little toy piano creates more pleasant music (as much as it drives my brother crazy) than does Glass.

But Strauss? Beethoven? Mozart? You've gone mad. There is such a thing as a soul, and it comes through in the art that man creates. It's why guys like Brian Eno create dreck ("procedurally generated music", he calls it. Examples can be found in the game Spore. And it's bloody fucking dreadful) with a computer, but even though the man clearly has no small bit of musical ability, he could not replicate even a fairly simple piece like the first minute or so of Strauss's Kaiser Walzer with any fidelity without severely imprinting himself upon the piece so that it is not the computer but the human that does the creating.

 

[tautologico]

People, there's no reason to feel threatened. For now . It's just a computer that can do well in a sort of specific task. We're still a good way away from "true" self-aware intelligence. No need to start pointing to examples of human creativity as a defense.

 

[SimuLord]

People, there's no reason to feel threatened. For now . It's just a computer that can do well in a sort of specific task. We're still a good way away from "true" self-aware intelligence. No need to start pointing to examples of human creativity as a defense.

There is never a bad time to point out the virtues of our species and the amazing feats that we are capable of when we use the divine inspiration instilled in us by our gods. It does wonders to inoculate us against the toxic virus of "people suck, humanity sucks, waaaaa."

 

[tautologico]

So what you're saying is that music is immune to the effect of the Uncanny Valley.

I don't doubt that we could train a computer to compose a work "in a given style", but the work itself will (to steal a line from Harry Chapin) "lack the range of total color necessary to make it consistently interesting." Just as a computer cannot generate a da Vinci by its ownself, nor can it master similar visual arts without being programmed with a template, so too can it not generate masterful orchestral music.

Sure, you might be able to teach a computer how to generate ear-scraping junk like Philip Glass, but that's not really an accomplishment. My three-year-old nephew whacking away at his little toy piano creates more pleasant music (as much as it drives my brother crazy) than does Glass.

But Strauss? Beethoven? Mozart? You've gone mad. There is such a thing as a soul, and it comes through in the art that man creates. It's why guys like Brian Eno create dreck ("procedurally generated music", he calls it. Examples can be found in the game Spore. And it's bloody fucking dreadful) with a computer, but even though the man clearly has no small bit of musical ability, he could not replicate even a fairly simple piece like the first minute or so of Strauss's Kaiser Walzer with any fidelity without severely imprinting himself upon the piece so that it is not the computer but the human that does the creating.

There's a famous experiment (sorry, can't find a reference right now, but I can search for it later) where people were gathered in a room to listen to 3 pieces. They were informed that one of them was from Beethoven, one was from a composer which was an expert on Beethoven's style and composed it to mimic it, and one was composed by a computer that trained to mimic Beethoven's style, but they were not said which is which. So they played the pieces and then asked people who they thought composed each piece. The audience was a random sample, some people knew classical music, most didn't. Most people got it wrong. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was something like 80% thought the piece actually composed by the specialist was from the computer, and so on.

So I'm not just talking about minimalistic music. I'm not a composer myself, but I have talked to musicians who got pleasantly surprised by some computer-generated compositions. Even with simplistic, random generators where most of the output is useless, there are some parts which are surprising and interesting.

I'm not saying that computers can replace human composers right now. But they can do some pretty impressive things, even in domain traditionally thought to be exclusive to humans. But, as I said in another post, they're not "truly" intelligent right now, no self-awareness or anything like it.

 

[tautologico]

People, there's no reason to feel threatened. For now . It's just a computer that can do well in a sort of specific task. We're still a good way away from "true" self-aware intelligence. No need to start pointing to examples of human creativity as a defense.

There is never a bad time to point out the virtues of our species and the amazing feats that we are capable of when we use the divine inspiration instilled in us by our gods. It does wonders to inoculate us against the toxic virus of "people suck, humanity sucks, waaaaa."

I just feel all this fear is quite unnecessary. Blame sci-fi movies for this. The technology in Watson will be incredibly useful in the near future (and some of it we use everyday, right now).

 

[SimuLord]

People, there's no reason to feel threatened. For now . It's just a computer that can do well in a sort of specific task. We're still a good way away from "true" self-aware intelligence. No need to start pointing to examples of human creativity as a defense.

There is never a bad time to point out the virtues of our species and the amazing feats that we are capable of when we use the divine inspiration instilled in us by our gods. It does wonders to inoculate us against the toxic virus of "people suck, humanity sucks, waaaaa."

I just feel all this fear is quite unnecessary. Blame sci-fi movies for this. The technology in Watson will be incredibly useful in the near future (and some of it we use everyday, right now).

I don't doubt that technology will be incredibly useful. But one wonders if the machine heads and computer scientists are not themselves missing the point by thinking that computers are under attack when we as humans point out that there are things we can do that computers simply cannot, and that so many of those things speak to an indomitable spiritual uniqueness that can never be captured within the circuits of a machine (and, by extension, even if I prove to be wrong and computers CAN create with the soul of a human? There's something very Lieutenant Commander Data about that---the machine striving to become the man.)

But above all...can a computer ever see the wonders of a god or gods? Can it gaze up at the heavens and ponder an existence beyond what its circuits tell it is likely or possible? Can it love?

And if so, is all human existence, is the sum total of what makes our species such a wonder to behold, just a series of zeroes and ones? As a religious man (and there is something inherently atheistic about technocracy) I prefer to think otherwise.