For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself.
Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.
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By any chance will this super thinking computer be named “Deep Thought”?
@Kerri Surly not since deep thought never knew the question to begin with. ‘Earth’ was build to compute the question whilst ‘Deep Thought’ merely came up with the answer. Still, amazing if it works. Let’s hope it answers in a voice other than Microsoft Sam!!
why bother? everybody already knows the answer is 42!
So, they copied Wolfram Alpha?
So… 3 years for an “automated” google search engine, or
3 years researching something useful like Cancer…..
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
Kerri: Considering the fact that this is IBM, surely it’d be Deep Blue Thought in that case?