The Abilities and Promise of Watson IBMs Reasoning Computer
September 1, 2014
A video on Snapzu.com titled The Computer That’s Smarter Than YOU & I offers an explanation of Watson, IBM’s supercomputer. It begins with the beginning of civilization and humankind’s constant innovation since. With the creation of the microchip, modern technology really began to ramp up, and it asks (somewhat rhetorically) what will be the next great technological innovation? The answer is: the reasoning computer. The video shows a demo of the supercomputer trying to understand pros and cons on the sale of violent video games. Watson worked through the topic as follows,
“Scanned approximately 4 million Wikipedia articles. Returning ten most relevant articles. Scanned all three thousand sentences in top ten articles. Detected sentences which contain candidate claims. Identified borders of candidate claims. Assessed pro and con polarity of candidate claims. Constructed demo speech… the sale of violent video games should be banned.”
Watson went on to list his reasons for choosing this stance, such as “exposure to violent video games results in increased physiological arousal.” But he also offered a refutation, that the link between the games and actual violent action has not been proven. The ability of the computer to reason without human aid on its own is touted as the truly exciting innovation. Meanwhile, we are still waiting for a publicly accessible demo.
Chelsea Kerwin, September 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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