[ExI] Watson On Jeopardy

[Samantha Atkins]

On 02/16/2011 05:21 PM, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 4:39 PM, Samantha Atkins<sjatkins at mac.com>  wrote:
>> On 02/16/2011 10:15 AM, spike wrote:
>> Not the same problem domain or even all that close.  Can you turn it into a
>> really good chatbot?  Maybe, maybe not depending on your standard of "good".
>>   But that wouldn't be very exciting.    Very expensive way to keep folks in
>> the nursing home entertained.
> Samantha, are you familiar with Moore's law?

No, gosh, never heard of it before.  :P

>   Let's assume for purposes
> of discussion that you are 30, that you will be in the nursing home
> when you're 70. That means Watson level functionality will cost around
> $0.15 in 2011 dollars by the time you need a chatbot... ;-) You'll get
> it in a box of cracker jacks.

Moore's Law is not enough.  You need much better algorithmic approaches 
and in some cases any workable algorithm at all.  There are algorithms 
that have changed enough that running the modern version on a 1980 PC 
outperforms running the 1980 algorithm on a supercomputer today.   
Moore's Law is about hardware.  Software has notoriously failed to keep 
pace.  For many tasks we don't have vetted algorithms at all yet or a 
clear idea of how to achieve the desired results.

- samantha