[ExI] Kurzweil On Watson

[Darren Greer]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20110120/tc_zd/259558

John will like this. Kurzweil says in his opening salve some of what he's
been saying in the Watson threads.

"In *The Age of Intelligent Machines*, which I wrote in the mid 1980s, I
predicted that a computer would defeat the world chess
champion<http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20110120/tc_zd/259558#> by
1998. My estimate was based on the predictable exponential growth of
computing power (an example of what I now call the "law of accelerating
returns") and my estimate of what level of computing was needed to achieve a
chess rating of just under 2800 (sufficient to defeat any human, although
lately the best human chess scores have inched above 2800). I also predicted
that when that happened we would either think better of computer
intelligence, worse of human thinking, or worse of chess, and that if
history was a guide, we would downgrade chess."

d.

-- 
*There is no history, only biography.*
*
*
*-Ralph Waldo Emerson
*
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