IBM Makes Major Advance in Artificial Intelligence

I, Robot...Incoming?


Funny how everything happens all at once. It has been a long time coming and it is quite amazing seeing everything being played out.

The inches to mile analogy makes me think that they are going to go from where we think we are at to where we thought we would be in 100 years very soon. (confusing I know)

Originally posted by Smell The Roses
I, Robot...Incoming?

My thought exactly. Before I read this, I thought I wouldn't have to worry about that scenario in my lifetime, but now I'm not so sure.

Let's be nice to to the machines we create. When they take over, they might let us live, if we were nice to them.

I'm only half joking.

reply to post by SonOfTheLawOfOne


S&F op for the find! I posted this the other day on my artificial intelligence thread.

If you guys are interested in reading more about AI you can check it out here
The Future is Coming: Artificial Intelligence

Originally posted by VonDoomen
reply to post by SonOfTheLawOfOne

 

S&F op for the find! I posted this the other day on my artificial intelligence thread.

If you guys are interested in reading more about AI you can check it out here
The Future is Coming: Artificial Intelligence

Thanks!

I subscribed to your thread... good stuff there as well!

S&F for you too!

~Namaste

reply to post by igigi

Give a couple of the videos a try, it's MUCH more than just Dragon Naturally Speaking and Ask Jeeves combined.
IBM explains how questions and answers aren't simply a prompt-answer format, some questions are worded confusingly, or in the case of Jeopardy!, organized to deliberately fool you. To throw you off the right answer trail.

That's not intelligence. That's logical deduction based off of key-words and heuristics. Computers should be more difficult to fool than a human, as it is completely incapable of reading into a statement, and has no need to understand the question - only the capability to return an answer that makes -you- think the computer understood and provided an answer. More on this later.

With that in mind, you can begin to see how a very complex set of algorithms would need to be developed, just to understand what the computer is being asked! Beyond that point it's even more complex to chalk up a response adequate enough for the question posed.

Again, that's not intelligence. It's incapable of doing anything that doesn't exist within its databases and computer algorithms.

I work with simulators a lot. There are very interesting quirks to different methods of simulations - one such revolves around the look-up table data used for flight simulators. They provide some of the most accurate and computationally efficient simulations in regular scenarios included within their matrix. However, they behave completely erratically when any one of the data in the matrix is exceptional - such as when at an altitude the matrix doesn't cover, angles of attack stray outside of what the matrix can handle, etc. Further - this simulation is completely dependent upon data collected from real flight tests and recordings. It's not extrapolated by any form of intelligence or procedural analysis of a digital model by the computer running the simulation.

Now, some simulators now use a flight-dynamics model of varying complexity and simulation methods. These methods are often far more stable (less chance of erratic behavior) - and are often just as accurate as the various matrices used (and, often, the two are used in combination). But it's still not 'intelligent' - simply far more computationally expensive but with greater effectiveness.

The point is - anything with any kind of intelligence or understanding of concepts has the ability to 'fill in the gaps' without having to be told step-by-step what to do. It's the difference between an insect repeatedly flying into a glass door until it dies and a dog barking at its owner to open the glass door. The dog wasn't programmed with the knowledge that glass exists or that the owner knows how to remove the barrier. The dog 'figured it out' - developed the connection between the fact that people can absolve this 'invisible' barrier, and that communicating the desire to, also, go through this barrier can lead to the dog being able to pass through.

You'll see in the videos that Watson gets things wrong, and my even be prone to "infinite loops" of wrong answers. But I'm sure IBM has the bugs out, right?

See my reference to flight sims and what happens when your look-up tables can't handle the data presented.

The computer isn't even simulating human speech. It is merely programed how to give a response that resembles speech you and I use. Just like a computer isn't really flying a plane in a flight sim - or even simulating aerodynamics. It's simply making your little virtual plane pantomime the actions of a real plane. Your home entertainment system doesn't understand it's displaying a tree anymore than a video camera understands it is recording one. You are the one who thinks you are being shown a tree, when - really - you are just being shown a series of colored dots.

It's nothing resembling intelligence, nor does it really advance a computer's ability to 'understand' our speech. It's a mathematical process of locating key words and constructing a response we can make sense of while reading intelligence into the operation.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

I don't disagree with you, but AI has to happen in stages and this is the next stage.

This is not, even in the slightest, related to intelligence in a computer.

See the difference between an insect and a dog, above. Basic intelligence and the ability to understand things is such a fundamental thing that we often forget how important it is. Computers don't 'get' anything. Your hand-held battleship game doesn't 'get' the game. Path-finding AI doesn't "get" the concept of a barrier unless an obstruction is flagged as such. It is merely programmed that certain things are desirable, and other things are not - and it uses those criteria to 'make decisions.' It doesn't 'get' or attempt to 'get' anything.

Before the computer or robot can "do" anything for you, it first has to be able to process your requests through speech.

Speech recognition and voice-activated commands have only been around since the 80s.

Oh, and sorry, but you need to be corrected on this....

Dragon does simple dictation and speech recognition, it is not able to carry a conversation or tell the difference between a statement and a question like Watson does.

You're looking at this in far too limited of a scope. Dragon takes a set of vocal patterns and renders them as text - something much easier to work with in terms of computer programming. A separate program (or programming object) is used to pick out key words and identify questions versus statements based on the string. This is used to develop a criteria for the response and initiate separate objects to fulfill those criteria and process them for final assembly into a coherent string.

The computational model for this is simple and has been around for decades. We've merely lacked the processing capacity to make it a reality. A lot of instructions per second have to be going on under the hood for those kinds of things to be done - particularly in accurately analyzing vocal patterns (Dragon sacrifices accuracy for practicality - this computer can aim for accuracy and eat up all kinds of clock cycles analyzing vocal patterns ten ways to Sunday).

It also does not recognize when you are trying to be funny or witty or sarcastic, but Watson does. This is what "natural speech" means.

It's programmed with the concepts of humor and sarcasm already, because humans understand it to exist. It accounts for sarcasm, but it doesn't understand sarcasm anymore than it understands a conversation about theology.

Also, there is not a database with a bunch of questions and answers that it looks up, that would be ridiculous to call such a thing AI at all, and that is not what Watson does.

And, yet, that is exactly what it is. Every word is programmed and/or processed for some kind of mathematical and/or logical equivalence. You don't need a database with questions and answers - but you do need a database of words, just as you had to learn your vocabulary. It still has to have a source for its answers, just as you do. It's source is either a pre-formed database or the internet. It can't pull the answers to factual questions out of thin air anymore than you can.

You're fascinated because it doesn't behave like a computer your recognize. I'm unimpressed because it's nothing new. We just have the ability to do it on a practical scale, and a group decided to invest time into doing it.

It is meant to be a more "human" version of the chess playing Big Blue.

And, yet, Big Blue was not intelligent. Sure - it beat a chess champion, but that's like trying to say a rock is smart because it beat you at a staring contest.

Chess has a limited number of possible states. Using the existing state and the rule-sets, all possible states over the next five to ten moves can be calculated - with 'supercomputers' - hundreds of moves ahead can be calculated with thousands of potential states with favorable states and evolutions selected that increase the probability that favorable states will occur on behalf of the human player.

It's, conceptually, very simple - just very computationally intensive. And it's nearly impossible for a human being to compete - it's impossible to trick, and assigns no value to any piece, just values the state of the board.

The closest things to intelligent computers have not seen much publicity. I forget the name - but there's a computer capable of 'learning' and forming basic assumptions through interacting with objects and observing their behavior. That is far closer to 'intelligence' than anything that has been done so far. It's rather limited stuff - such as 'understanding' the behavior of a toy car, stacking boxes, etc.

It's just not got the same splash - big deal, a computer can push a toy car around and figure out that it can only move 'forward' and 'backward' (well, easily). However, it's a massive deal - for a computer to actually 'understand' something to the point it can formulate its own solutions to problems. Simple problems - but it does things without being programmed specifically for the task.

This type of stuff gets attention because it's stuff we can read into. Big Blue beats a chess player and we suddenly think computers can think and formulate strategies (because Chess is attributed to an intellectual game). This thing can compete at Jeopardy and people suddenly think computers can converse with us. In each of those cases, we are reading into the actions of a computer and personifying it - something we are great at. However, the operations behind them are incredibly simple, and not at all a reflection of intelligent behavior.

reply to post by Aim64C


You never heard of Geoff Shively, have you? Probably never heard of VersAI either? Not once did you mention temporal input, which I'm guessing is foreign to you in simulation world where everything you write is static and a non-moving target because it relies completely on databases and math. I can't believe that as a computer person, you don't recognize what an advancement this is for IBM to have gotten to this point.

For future reference, please try to keep posts more digestible and in smaller chunks because most readers do not want nor care to go through your simulation experience, they just want facts. Speaking of which....

That's not intelligence. That's logical deduction based off of key-words and heuristics. Computers should be more difficult to fool than a human, as it is completely incapable of reading into a statement, and has no need to understand the question - only the capability to return an answer that makes -you- think the computer understood and provided an answer. More on this later.

Starting with YOUR opinion of intelligence.... Human's read speech in exactly the same way... intelligence is nothing more than the ability to learn or be taught something new. Computers, therefore, have the ability to exceed any human intelligence by orders of magnitude because they can store and recall information FAR better than humans, but the paradox is that they can only ever be as intelligent as their creator. A computer does more than just read a statement and provide an answer, that just tells me that you have never worked with applications more advanced than simulators. With Watson's speech recognition, it has to read more than just your statement to come to a decision about how to answer... again, isn't this the same as what we term as human intelligence? I say "wow, that's bad!" - how do you know if I'm talking about something terrible that happened or if I think it's something very interesting? You have to understand the context of it, and it involves some degree of intelligence. You have to make several calculations in your mind to determine what type of speech relates to sarcasm versus what kinds relate to an empirical statement. The human brain does the exact same thing by comparing past experience and memories to the current situation and formulating a decision based on it... if you didn't have a past experience or memory, your chances of making the wrong choice increase just by the odds, not by lack of intelligence. Your statement above is based on opinion, not fact, and is incorrect. Look up AI and do some research, please, because you are making true AI sound bad.

IF you had done some research, or even watched the videos that another poster suggested on how Watson works, you would realize that it was designed so that if it gets an answer wrong, the next time it's asked it will know the wrong answer is wrong and won't give it... that isn't as intelligent as a human? Because that is the exact same thing people do, minus the ignorance and arrogance that the computer wasn't "programmed" to use by other socially retarded computers that think ignorance and arrogance is helpful to the process of learning.

Again, that's not intelligence. It's incapable of doing anything that doesn't exist within its databases and computer algorithms.

This is not true... if you knew anything about AI, and not just simulation software development, you would know that there are self-learning systems. (in fact, you can Google self-learning artificial intelligence and see for yourself)

Just like a human being, you have to first hear or witness something to commit it to your memory and use it for future decision making, which is what human intelligence is based on as well as temporal input.... being cognitively aware. AI systems, not the ones used in sims or games, are built so that the computer or interface can determine if it already knows something, and if it doesn't, it will ask questions about it to build a construct of it and commit it to memory. You can then ask it things about what it committed and asked you, and it will derive abstract answers from it.

For example... you say "duck"... it asks you if a duck is a mammal... you say yes it is... it asks if it has feathers, you say yes it does... it checks what other animals it's aware of that also have feathers and is a mammal and continues asking questions that associate attributes to other animals and it starts to create logical groupings on it's own. This is the same way human intelligence has evolved and almost the exact same way children "grow up". You are expecting that because a computer CAN surpass human intelligence that it should through artificial intelligence design.... which shows your lack of understanding of how intelligence builds on itself over the collective experiences and cognitive awareness one possesses, computers included.

Just because it doesn't jump up and calculate how to wipe out mankind does not mean it is not intelligent. You are putting WAY too much into what intelligence is based on human perception and not looking at it for how the process of intelligence has evolved in humans, which is what AI is based on.

I skipped your sim rant because it has nothing to do with the thread or how AI and fuzzy logic and the above mentioned processes work. Sim is based on information collected by humans and added to the system... true AI adds information to the system itself and can even re-write it's own code to be more efficient and "smarter" at making decisions. The way it does this is designed by humans and therefore, is not complete in the truest sense of artificial intelligence, but as I mentioned in the original post, it's getting there and this is a step towards that.

It also does not recognize when you are trying to be funny or witty or sarcastic, but Watson does. This is what "natural speech" means.

It's programmed with the concepts of humor and sarcasm already, because humans understand it to exist. It accounts for sarcasm, but it doesn't understand sarcasm anymore than it understands a conversation about theology.

Right... as I'm sure you understood sarcasm right from the womb, huh? You didn't have to hear it many hundreds, if not thousands of times to identify it in the first place, and then had to wait until you had a foundation of the english language, which you had to LEARN, to understand what the definition of sarcasm means so you could relate it to the speech patterns of others? Again, isn't this EXACTLY what AI does? Yes, I believe so... and theology is a man-made concept, not one that has to do with one's natural surroundings, so I would not expect a computer to desire a discussion on theology anytime soon, nor would I expect it to arrive at the philosophical conclusions that humans have without the same foundation of knowledge.

I have no reason to debate the other straw man arguments in the post, but I would kindly ask that you read up on some of the more "advanced" artificially intelligence systems, designs, computer science papers, scientific journals on this subject.

You sound like a very bright individual, so I have little doubt that you won't find what I'm saying to be true once you have done the research on it, but would also caution you not to compare apples to oranges when it comes to traditional computer programming and application design principles to those of artificial intelligence. They are similar in some basic ways, but worlds apart in most others.

Thanks for posting to my thread!

~Namaste