[Beowulf] IBM's Watson on Jeopardy tonight

[Jonathan Aquilina]

On 2/16/11 3:22 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
> particularly in terms of the ability to manipulate the surroundings), and, as someone pointed out the energy consumption is quite different (as is the underlying computational rate... lots of fairly slow neurons with lots of parallelism vs relatively few really fast transistors)
>
> Watson is a particularly impressive natural language understanding system, with a fairly constrained user interface.  But for other aspects of "life" or "human-ness" other researchers are doing pieces of the puzzle (perhaps not to the level of Watson or Deep Blue).  There are self organizing and self replicating robots (granted, with the "intelligence" of less than a flatworm).
>
> A big advance will be when the machine not only can build its own tools, but can independently figure out what tools it needs to build.  The former is more a matter of physical manipulation, the latter requires creativity and thought.  That's a pretty high bar; there are humans that can't figure out what tool is needed to solve a problem, independently, without having seen someone else do the task.

To throw something interesting into the loop here.

What about the scaled down versions of watson in the cars that take part 
in the darpa challenge. that basically drive themselves? aren't those a 
lot like humans since they are taking in information from many sensors. 
If AI is used i think we possibly could have a human brain in respect to 
driving a car.