<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Jan 31, 2011, at 12:31 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; ">Talk about one subject. Then talk about something else. A human can handle this - even if they are not an expert in all things (which no human is, though some try to pretend they are). These AIs completely break down.<span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span></span></blockquote><br></div><div>Until now it was true that AI programs were very brittle, but that's why I was so impressed with Watson, its knowledge base is so vast and it's so good at finding the appropriate information from even vague poorly phrased input that with only a few modifications you could make a program that could speak about anything and do so intelligently enough not to be embarrassing. Of course I'm not saying it would always speak brilliantly, if it did that it would be a dead giveaway that's its not human and fail the Turing Test.</div><div><br></div><div> John K Clark</div><br></body></html>