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

[Kelly Anderson]

2011/1/28 Dave Sill <sparge at gmail.com>:
> 2011/1/28 John Clark <jonkc at bellsouth.net>
>>
>> Like finding the question to a strangely worded answer neither it nor
>> anybody else on this planet had ever heard before?
>
> That's exactly what Watson was designed and programmed to do. Make a machine
> with no Jeopardy-specific programming that can be taught through verbal
> human instruction to play the game, and that machine will almost certainly
> pass the Turing Test. Watson isn't even close.

So when IBM creates a machine with the specific programming task of
"Pass the Turing Test" that won't be intelligence either, because it
was programmed to pass the Turing test... right???

Again, I just don't think anyone has a clue how to define intelligence
or consciousness. We have trouble knowing whether fellow human beings
are really conscious. Ayn Rand seemed to think most of her fellow
travelers were, in fact, not conscious. I don't know that I go along
with that level of skepticism, but most of us have had the childish
delusion that we ourselves were the only "real" people. If we can't
even figure out for sure if each other as humans are conscious, how
are we going to determine if a machine is?

>> I just have little patience with the "if a man does it then it's
>> intelligence but if a machine does it then it's not" school of thought.
>
> The key is learning and understanding. It doesn't matter if it's a man or a
> machine, or if the machine is using one or more clever tricks. A machine
> that plays one game brilliantly but has no ability to learn other games
> isn't intelligent.

The right question here seems to me to be "Does Watson Learn?"
Everything I have read seems to indicate that Watson knows answers to
questions because Watson has processed a huge amount of free text from
the Internet or perhaps Wikipedia or something. The point is that
nobody sat down and programmed Watson to answer specific questions.
This seems like "learning" by "reading" to me, and if so, that is a
tremendous new capability (at least at this level of utility) for
computers.

If you asked Watson questions about Jeopardy, I'd bet it could answer
a lot of them. It isn't that it "knows" anything. I don't have any
belief that Watson is conscious or anything like that. But there are
days that even Google "seems" to be intelligent... Wolfram Alpha is
another step in this same general direction. Will general intelligence
emerge out of these kinds of inference engines? I tend to think not,
but maybe.

As for GEB, I haven't read it for a VERY long time, but I recall that
I liked the Bach and Esher parts, but the Godel stuff didn't resonate.

-Kelly