Quote:
Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
I'm not surprised. A computer program doesn't have to do anything other than what it was programmed for. A program that can play a game doesn't know how to paint, or write music, and vice versa. It can be made to do one thing extremely well.
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Programming is all; witness IBM's computer "Watson"; it was specifically programmed to compete against humans on the TV game show "Jeopardy" and actually defeated two of the all time champions, including Ken Jennings, the champion supreme. Most impressive was the fact Watson was not connected to the Internet in any way and was having to devise it's responses from a pool of information stored on hard drives.
There is a very good book,
Final Jeopardy: The Story of Watson, the Computer That Will Transform Our World, outlining how IBM created and programmed Watson. Watson is now being developed for other uses and has seen marked success in the medical field as a diagnostic tool for hard to diagnose cases (Watson will probably still have better people skill than Dr. House)...
Here is a link to IBM's Watson webpage:
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/...tson/?lnk=buwa
When Watson defeated the human competitors on Jeopardy, Ken Jennings added a little note to his Final Jeopardy response:
It probably doesn't hurt to suck up to your possible future boss...
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