Ken Jennings on playing against Watson:
http://www.slate.com/id/2284721/pagenum/all/ (01)
On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 10:37 AM, John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Peter and Krzysztof,
>
> PB
>> "artificial intelligence" is neither.
>
> That's a quibble about a name. Many people, including me, have stated
> such quibbles from time to time, but they're irrelevant. They're as
> pointless as the behaviorists who objected to the name 'psychology'
> because it implies an unobservable psyche.
>
> John McCarthy coined the term 'artificial intelligence'. He also
> designed LISP, and he was the primary advocate of logic-based
> techniques in AI, which spilled over into every other area of
> computer science. He also published some papers about philosophical
> issues in AI, which stimulated much of the R & D that led to our
> current work on formal ontology.
>
> PB
>> I seriously worry that such a failed dismal experiment of the
>> last century...
>
> The amount of high quality research done under the name of AI
> has been enormous, and it has been so thoroughly integrated into
> the foundations of computer science that its AI origins have often
> been forgotten:
>
> 1. Just look at LISP, which contributed the if-then-else statement,
> recursion, lambda expressions, metalanguage, garbage collection,
> the ability to write an interpreter or compiler of a language
> in itself, etc. (McCarthy, by the way, was also a member of
> the IFIP committee that designed Algol, so his influence was
> very direct.)
>
> 2. Java is basically LISP + CLOS (Common Lisp Object System)
> written in a syntax based on C. But the AI community had
> 30 years of experience in using and extending that technology.
> Sun (which designed Java) was founded by former Stanford
> students who learned LISP and AI from McCarthy and others
> and who built their company by selling workstations for AI.
>
> 3. Most of the technology for logic-based systems, theorem provers,
> formal languages, parsers, etc., was either pioneered in AI
> or applied and extended in AI projects.
>
> 4. People like Ted Codd, who founded the relational DB community,
> were strongly influenced by AI. Codd wrote his PhD dissertation
> on cellular automata and participated in joint projects on AI
> related issues. Among them was his RENDEZVOUS system for
> an English query language for RDBs (and, by the way, Codd's
> group used a parser that I wrote for their front end).
>
> PB
>> [AI] now re-emerges with respectable "semantic web" clothing.
>
> Please note that the Semantic Web is just a tiny subset of AI
> technology, and the primary developers came from the AI community.
>
> The person who developed RDF was Ramanathan Guha, who wrote his
> PhD dissertation at Stanford with McCarthy as his supervisor.
> While he was finishing his PhD, he worked on Cyc and became
> the associate director of Cyc. He later went to Apple, where
> he developed the Meta Content Framework (MCF). He then went
> to Netscape, where he worked with Tim Bray to rewrite MCF in
> XML to form RDF.
>
> Guha later collaborated with Pat Hayes and others (also from
> the AI community) to define the semantic foundations for RDF
> and OWL. (Just check Google for "Guha Hayes RDF" and
> "Guha Hayes OWL" to find the W3C documents.) And OWL began
> as a combination of two AI projects, DAML + OIL, and was
> further enhanced by people from the AI community.
>
> KJ
>> Watson is a question answering machine and a very good one. Maybe one
>> day they will deploy it on your mobile phone with a Internet connection
>> to the processing and storage unit in the cloud similar to the Wolfram
>> Alpha App. Watson is not intelligent in the sense that it does not
>> understand the answers or questions but it turns out that in many cases
>> this is not necessary. I think that as a research domain we should be
>> rather happy that Watson won and congratulate IBM -- it is a strong
>> showcase for our work.
>
> I strongly agree. The people who worked on Watson had a strong
> foundation in both AI and comp. sci. It is a respectable piece
> of research.
>
> Anybody who doubts these points should do some remedial studies
> in the history of AI and computer science.
>
> John
>
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