NOT Watson and Jeopardy

[Scott Elcomb]

On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 2:52 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 02:01:32PM -0500, Scott Elcomb wrote:
>> On Thursday, CBC will be airing a documentary called "Remote Control
>> War" which looks into the current and near-future state of the
>> militarization of AI.
>>
>> <http://communities.canada.com/ottawacitizen/blogs/defencewatch/archive/2011/02/21/new-documentary-on-predators-and-other-uavs-fighting-a-remote-control-war-to-air-on-thursday.aspx>
>>
>> Trailer at: <http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/doczone/video.html?ID=1775629745>
>>
>> I look forward to conversation about this in light of Watson's achievement.
>
> Why?  Watson is not an AI, and never claimed to be as far as I know.
>
> Now AI is neat, but not really at all the same thing.

"Watson is an artificial intelligence computer system capable of
answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's
DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David
Ferrucci. Watson was named for IBM's first president, Thomas J.
Watson. The program operates on POWER7 processor-based systems.

In 2011, as a test of its abilities, Watson competed on the quiz show
Jeopardy!, in the show's first and only human-versus-machine matchup."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(artificial_intelligence_software)>

Later in the overview, the entry states "Watson is a question
answering (QA) computing system built by IBM. IBM describes it as 'an
application of advanced Natural Language Processing, Information
Retrieval, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and Machine
Learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering'
which is 'built on IBM's DeepQA technology for hypothesis generation,
massive evidence gathering, analysis, and scoring.'"

I believe Watson falls squarely under the umbrella term of Artificial
Intelligence.

-- 
  Scott Elcomb
  http://www.psema4.com/   @psema4

  Clerk of the Pirate Party of Canada
  http://www.pirateparty.ca/
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