[ExI] Watson On Jeopardy.

[Mike Dougherty]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 10:00 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> done." As for the physicists, they built a lot of smaller colliders
> along the way. There was one about ten feet across in the basement of
> the science building at BYU... I'm sure that the preliminary results
> that they achieved with those smaller colliders gave the people
> funding the hadron collider confidence that they weren't throwing
> their money down a rat hole.

True enough.  However, if there really is a tipping point between the
number of neurons in a network that makes a "dumb" slug turn emerge as
a higher-order intelligence then any smaller-scale system would likely
be ridiculed as a narrow-domain toy.  If you doubt this, consider
Watson's recent achievement:  "Yeah sure but can it accomplish
anything I would ask of a biological 4 year old?"

If you want to study an anthill or a beehive and you should someone
pictures/movies/papers/etc. on a single ant or bee, will they have any
appreciation of the scale at which the group dynamic is operating?
Could you have predicted the existence of puffers, gliders, glider
guns, etc. from Conway's basic Game of Life rules?

If/when Richard shows you a paper that proves a 3 cell "organism" (for
lack of a better term) oscillates with a period of 2 and is completely
stable in that configuration, would you be willing to invest in a
larger strategy?  No?  How many cells at what duration would be
convincing enough to spend your first $million?

'just curious...