IBM Watson: Factoids and Perfect Haikus
June 18, 2016
I read “AI Will “Help Humans Make Better Decisions” Says IBM Watson General Manager.” I like it when smart software improves human decision making. Wait. If the software were able to help humans, wouldn’t IBM be the dominant company in artificial intelligence. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and the others in the AI game would be sucking wind and reporting financial headwinds? Hmmm. IBM seems to be the leader in AI talk and a bit of a laggard in the revenues department.
Here’s a factoid:
Watson can understand data at astonishing speeds and volumes. In fact, it reads 800 million pages per second. It can reason to form hypotheses, make considered arguments and prioritize recommendations to help humans make decisions.
Now that is an impressive number. I want to ask, “What is a page?” and “What happens when a page consists of an image and a table of data?” 800 million. Zippy indeed. Compared to what and at what cost for computing infrastructure?
And again with the factoid:
[IBM Watson] programmers trained InkWell with Watson’s Tone Analyzer and Personality Insights to analyze the words for emotion, word selection, personality and tone. The result is a perfect haiku that conveys emotion and tone, demonstrating how a cognitive system can understand language beyond statistics.
Does IBM Watson’s perfect haiku take this form?
What about the work of Basho, Buson, Shiki, and Issa. Consider this translation of Issa’s haiku:
The wren
Earns his living
Noiselessly.
Watson should be, in my opinion, able to answer the question, “How does IBM grow its revenues?” Issa might think of a run away horse. Is that whirring I hear the sound of Issa’s ducks quacking. Noiselessly, not likely. Weakly sounds the IBM marketing howls.
Stephen E Arnold, June 18, 2016
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
