Artificial

Intelligence, Watson and the final checkmate

The joining of genetics to bits, the essential merger March 03, 2011, 11:14 AM By Ricardo Murer B.S. in Computer Science (USP) and Master's Degree in Communications (USP). Specialist in digital strategy and new technologies. Follow@rdmurer Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of research that is both fascinating and mysterious, influenced by science fiction to such extent that many of us find it impossible to differentiate what is real and what is the fruit of the imagination of Hollywood writers and directors. The subject recently returned to the media when IBM's computer "Watson, a "Deep Question &Answer" (DeepQA) machine, participated in the American TV show Jeopardy!, beating two of its human competitors. The show is exquisite by submitting the answers to participants who must then find the corresponding question. Watson is in fact a combination of 90 servers, 16 Terabytes of memory, and a processing capacity of 180,000 Gigabytes per second! The most beautiful and purest parallel brute force of computing today. This is not the first time that a "deep" beats a human being in a competition. In 1997, "Deep Blue" (you must remember), an IBM chess computer, beat the then champion Garry Kasparov. Are we experiencing the onset of our decline, our defeat to machines smarter than we are? Fortunately, not yet. In both cases, we are referring to specialized machines, computers able to perform efficiently, probabilistically and extremely rapidly, in the analysis and weighing of millions of possibilities, and through a combination of algorithms, make the least unfavorable decision. While then scientists had initially intended to reproduce the laws of thought and create a machine that emulated the human being, the approach today is different. That is because the objective of creating a machine that has the capacity to learn, contemplate, think and rationalize has proven to be well beyond our capacity. The complexity of such a task stems from the fact that intelligence cannot be defined and understood solely by one field of knowledge but by the sum of all fields such as biology, philosophy, psychology and mathematics. Among the new approaches, connectionism attempts to draw computer processes close to the human brain through "neural networks", while the symbolism is behind specialist systems. AI today has concentrated many of its efforts into simulating human cognitive capacities though simulation and understanding of natural language, recognition of patterns and learning.

However, we are still far from creating the perfect simulation of the human brain and eventually something that can be deemed the result of intelligence, even if by something of a rudimentary intelligence. Perhaps it is because the computer, the one that counts, or the ordinateur, the one that sorts to order and classifies, remain, in spite all techno-scientific advancements, a spectacular calculating and counting machine, and nothing more. Perhaps because genetics is yet to join with bits, the essential merger able to bring light to the first thinking android, which will from generation to generation create new machines able to evolve from simple toolmakers to builders of complex societies. With the passing of time, they will be capable of simulating not just intelligence, but also other human capacities such as aesthetic feeling, moral judgment, friendship and emotions, converting what was once artificial into natural. The final checkmate.