[ExI] Oxford scientists edge toward quantum PC with 10b qubits.

[Richard Loosemore]

Dave Sill wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 11:01 AM, Richard Loosemore <rpwl at lightlink.com 
> <mailto:rpwl at lightlink.com>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     What is sad about all this is that AI has been through so many of
>     these cycles.  Thinking that dictionary lookup plus a few extras is
>     all you need for intelligence.  This is true.  It is just that the
>     "few extras" are 99.999% of the problem.
> 
> 
> I completely agree that Watson isn't AI, but I disagree that it's 
> trivial. From an AI perspective, a google search may be trivial, but the 
> ability to search hundreds of thousands of web sites instantly is 
> incredibly useful--and, although it's a simple idea, implementing it is 
> anything but trivial.
> 
> Thinking of Watson as a next gen search engine one starts to see how 
> important it could be. Sure, I can type a query into google on my phone. 
> And I haven't tried it, but I think I can even speak a query into my 
> phone, though I don't think it'll speak the results back to me. But if I 
> could speak a query to Watson and get a spoken response almost 
> instantly? That would be awesome. "Who played bass on 
> In-a-gadda-da-vida?" "Lee Dorman". With Google that's going to take a 
> few minutes and a couple of searches--and you could easily get the wrong 
> answer. Now imagine a personal Watson that has access your personal 
> data. "What the name of the pizza joint in Peoria I went to back in 
> '05?" That would be handy. How about a chronological list of every known 
> pizza joint I've been to?

I really just meant "trivial when taken as a step toward AGI".

As a next-gen search engine?  Well..... isn't it using a supercomputer 
just to answer Jeopardy questions?


Richard Loosemore