[ExI] Watson On Jeopardy

[Kelly Anderson]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 12:29 PM, Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> 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

Just as I suspected... ;-)

>>  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.

You forget the context here. I was talking about what would be
required to run a Watson-like system. That algorithm and software
clearly exists today. How did we cross wires here?

-Kelly