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Re: [ontolog-forum] IBM Watson's Final Jeopardy error "explanation"

To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "doug foxvog" <doug@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:23:59 -0500 (EST)
Message-id: <57724.69.143.211.222.1297981439.squirrel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Thu, February 17, 2011 16:27, Ron Wheeler said:
> On 17/02/2011 3:55 PM, Patrick Durusau wrote:    (01)

>> I don't question any of the statements that John has made.
>>
>> The problem is equating those achievements, which are considerable, with
>> intelligence.
>>
>> Despite the achievement with Watson, it could not cross the street
>> unassisted.    (02)

Nor can an airplane land on a branch or build a nest.  It can still fly.
Minsky has discussed a "society of mind" with a number of different types
of intelligence.    (03)

Building an object that can cross the street does not require the
object having intelligence.    (04)

And no, i don't think Watson shows intelligence.    (05)

> We don't let 3 year olds  cross a street unassisted.
> People with disabilities can't cross a street unassisted.
>
>> Not very "intelligent" at all.    (06)

Not a counter-example, but i agree with you.    (07)

>...
> Watson exhibits a lot of the hallmarks of intelligent. Does it then
> qualify as a human being? No.
> Would it do a better job at tasks that we think require a lot of
> intelligence and judgment? I think so.    (08)

The tasks you list below don't seem like things Watson could do.    (09)

> Will it be a better diagnostician than the best doctor? Maybe.    (010)

Watson is providing probabilistic matches between inputs and its
NL storage.  It can not explain its answers.  This suggests that
it would not be a better diagnostician than the poorest doctors.    (011)

> Will it make fewer mistakes than the average doctor? Probably.    (012)

Watson made a significant %age of errors in Jeopardy.  Far higher
than one would expect from any doctor.    (013)

In fact, most of the answers that it got were basically look-up
questions.  Not the puns and humor which IBM advertises.    (014)

> What parts of the practice of medicine require intelligence and
> judgment? Diagnosing difficult medical condition would seem to qualify.    (015)

And these tasks are far beyond Watson's demonstrated capabilities.    (016)

> How do you define intelligence?
>   Are doctors exhibiting intelligence when the diagnose a patient's
> problem and recommend a course of treatment?    (017)

> If a machine is doing the same thing but better, is it not evidence of
> intelligence.    (018)

There were expert systems in the 1970s that demonstrated diagnostic
capabilities.  And they could explain their diagnoses.  They could
suggest tests to make to clarify between multiple possible diagnoses.    (019)

> If you define intelligent as human-style thinking (which we are still
> not sure how that is actually done), you can say machines will never be
> intelligent because they lack biological structures.    (020)

> I don't think that that has ever been a recognized test for intelligence
> in AI but perhaps for the general public who have not given it much
> thought, the definition might be acceptable and somehow comforting.    (021)

No, i would not consider that necessary for diagnosis.    (022)

-- doug foxvog    (023)

> Ron
>> Hope you are having a great day!
>>
>> Patrick
>>
>> On 2/17/2011 3:16 PM, Obrst, Leo J. wrote:
>>> Amen, John! I quite agree with you.
>>>
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F.
>>> Sowa
>>> Sent: Thursday, February 17, 2011 1:37 PM
>>> To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] IBM Watson's Final Jeopardy error
>>> "explanation"
>>>
>>> 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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>    (024)


=============================================================
doug foxvog    doug@xxxxxxxxxx   http://ProgressiveAustin.org    (025)

"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
    - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
=============================================================    (026)


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