A.I. expert Ray Kurzweil picks computer in ‘Jeopardy!’ match
February 9, 2011 | Source: USA Today
Watson has the inside track on the “Jeopardy!” contest Monday Feb. 14, when the IBM computer system called “Watson” faces off against past “Jeopardy!” champs, says Ray Kurzweil. “But if it doesn’t win, it will come close, and it will come back and win in the very near future. Because it’s only going to get better. And humans are not getting better.”
Based on his calculations of the accelerating rate of growth of computing power, Kurzweil in the 1980s accurately predicted that a computer would defeat a world chess champion in 1998. IBM’s Deep Blue beat world champion chess player Garry Kasparov in 1997.
USA Today video interview with Ray Kurzweil
Comments (2)
by AbsolutePitch
[most] “humans are not getting better.”
by NeoAeon
Saw the first night of this. At first Watson was getting so many right so quickly it was annoying. But it still made some stranger errrors. What was more annoying still is that the game seemed to be boiling down more to button timing than to thinking ability, as both humans took a while to master the button, but seemed to fare pretty well once they did.
Still, I get the big point. AI is coming. Getting those 2880 processors into a laptop is only 11 to 15 years away. Any why in the world they didn’t have any of Kurweil’s speech recognition in there is anyone’s guess, as that would have been far more impressive, and only taken a processor or 2 more.