IBM's Watson on Jeopardy.

[Formaldehyde]

Congressman Rush D. Holt Jr. (D) successfully defends the honor of the human race, even though it was just one round instead of a complete game:

Watson vs. Humans: Score One for Congress

I.B.M.’s Watson may have pummeled Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter last month, but last week, a New Jersey Congressman beat the question-and-answer supercomputer.

To be sure, it was no ordinary politician. Representative Rush D. Holt Jr., a New Jersey Democrat, is a physicist who spent the nine years before he won his first congressional race in 1998 as the assistant director of the plasma physics laboratory at Princeton University.

Back in the 1970s, Mr. Holt recalled in an interview last Thursday, he tried his hand at Jeopardy!, and came away a five-time winner. He said he participated in the event in Washington, organized by I.B.M., to underscore the importance of government research funding and science education — and for the sheer cerebral sport of taking on Watson.
I.B.M.’s previous celebrity supercomputer, Deep Blue, beat the world chess champion Gary Kasparov. “But engaging in word play, which is so much a part of Jeopardy!, is very different than playing chess,” Mr. Holt observed.

Mr. Holt finished his round with 8,600 points to Watson’s 6,200. How did he do it?
By parsing the double-meaning of words more nimbly than Watson and betting big on a Daily Double and winning, Mr. Holt said.

The representative, for example, did well in the category Presidential Rhymes.
Clue: “Herbert’s Military Operations.”
Answer: “What are Hoover’s Maneuvers?”

In the category Fashion, Watson proved a wizard on haute couture and hemlines. “The Silicon kid beat me badly on that one,” Mr. Holt said. (Here’s more on how computers can be so smart at times, yet so dumb at others.)

But Mr. Holt really gained the upper hand when he hit a Daily Double, allowing a contestant to bet as much money as he or she has. Mr. Holt bet $3,000.
The category: “Animals I Fear.”
The clue: “Hippophobia”
“Somehow,” Mr. Holt said, “I recalled that hippopotamus means ‘river horse’ in ancient Greek.”
He correctly answered, “What is Fear of Horses?”

The representative came away a winner, but also suitably impressed by Watson. It was only one round, not a complete game. And Watson has not always won in the past. It won 71 percent of its warm-up matches with human Jeopardy! champions in the months before its televised match against Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter.

Still, Mr. Holt scored a minor triumph for the often-castigated political class. “I think more of Congress just hearing about it,” said Tom M. Mitchell, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and an artificial intelligence expert.

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[Miles Teg]

That Quaker is the last, best hope for humanity.

 

[classical_hero]

Indeed. You apparently missed my sarcasm and even have me confused with the Luddites who obviously don't know much about computers, which should be rather obvious given all my previous responses in this thread.


Um, that wasn't me who stated that. I would appreciate it if you edited your post to reflect the person who actually stated it.

Warpus is correct in that the human mind is so much greater than any machine can ever be. We also know how much larger all the computer parts had to be in comparison to all the parts that Watson needed. This is a huge leap forward for technology, but nothing can beat the human mind in what it can do.

 

[Formaldehyde]

Have you met our new computer overlords yet?

 

[GoodGame]

I'd love to see James Watson (remember Watson and Crick? and ) vs. Watson covering some biological topics straight from any textbook (biology) that has James Watson's name as a author on. Watson could even be given some read ahead time with said book. Would be interesting, not?

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Hmm, maybe not

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...-less-intelligent-than-westerners-394898.html

 

[Ayatollah So]

Congressman Rush D. Holt Jr. (D) successfully defends the honor of the human race,

Before we get too cocky, maybe we should let Watson go up against, oh, I dunno ... Michele Bachman?

 

[GoodGame]

Hmm, maybe not

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/s...-less-intelligent-than-westerners-394898.html

That'd make it even funnier.

Alex says, which famous scientist lost his job for alledgely racists statements?

And both Watsons simultaneously say, "Who is Watson?".

 

[warpus]

Warpus is correct in that the human mind is so much greater than any machine can ever be. We also know how much larger all the computer parts had to be in comparison to all the parts that Watson needed. This is a huge leap forward for technology, but nothing can beat the human mind in what it can do.

To be fair I never quite said that. My point was just that the processing & understanding of human language (such as English) is something we take for granted.. and is something that is incredibly hard to get a computer to do.

I'm certain that in the future we'll create machines that not only equal our mental capabilities, but also surpass them.

 

[Formaldehyde]

It's funny how so many brilliant scientists go completely off the deep end in areas other than their specialties.

 

[GamezRule]

 

[Dachs]

It's funny how so many brilliant scientists go completely off the deep end in areas other than their specialties.

I am fairly certain that genetics is the specialty of the man who received a joint Nobel Prize for helping to hash out the structure of DNA.

 

[Formaldehyde]

I am fairly certain that genetics is the specialty of the man who received a joint Nobel Prize for helping to hash out the structure of DNA.

The field of genetics and molecular biology is fairly vast. While Watson showed clear signs of genius in the specific area which he decided to specialize, e.g. unravaling the intricacies of DNA, he showed incredible bigotry and even a complete lack of scientific perspective in other aspects where he was clearly not an expert. He has been preaching what is essentially social Darwinism from his expert pulpit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_D._Watson

Watson has repeatedly supported genetic screening and genetic engineering in public lectures and interviews, arguing that stupidity is a disease and the "really stupid" bottom 10% of people should be cured.[44] He has also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great."[44]

On the issue of obesity, Watson has also been quoted as saying: "Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you're not going to hire them."[47]

Watson also had quite a few disagreements with Craig Venter regarding his use of EST fragments while Venter worked at NIH. Venter went on to found Celera genomics and continued his feud with Watson. Watson was even quoted as calling Venter "Hitler".[48]

While speaking at a conference in 2000, Watson had suggested a link between skin color and sex drive, hypothesizing that dark-skinned people have stronger libidos.[47][49] His lecture, complete with slides of bikini-clad women, argued that extracts of melanin – which gives skin its color – had been found to boost subjects' sex drive. "That's why you have Latin lovers," he said, according to people who attended the lecture. "You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English patient."[50]

On October 25, 2007, Watson was compelled to retire as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on New York's Long Island and from its board of directors, after Watson had been quoted in The Times the previous week as saying "[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really."[51] Responding to Watson’s stated views about race, biologist Steven Rose said: "This is Watson at his most scandalous. He has said similar things about women before but I have never heard him get into this racist terrain. If he knew the literature in the subject he would know he was out of his depth scientifically, quite apart from socially and politically."[52]

And now, his own publicly-released genome shows he is likely one of the people he claims are intellectually inferior.

Revealed: scientist who sparked racism row has black genes

An analysis of the genome of James Watson showed that 16 per cent of his genes were likely to have come from a black ancestor of African descent. By contrast, most people of European descent would have no more than 1 per cent.

"This level is what you would expect in someone who had a great-grandparent who was African," said Kari Stefansson of deCODE Genetics, whose company carried out the analysis. "It was very surprising to get this result for Jim."

The findings were made available after Dr Watson became only the second person to publish his fully sequenced genome online earlier this year. Dr Watson was forced to resign his post as head of a research laboratory in New York shortly after triggering an international furore by questioning the comparative intelligence of Africans. In an interview during his recent British book tour, the American scientist said he was "inherently gloomy about the prospects for Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours whereas all the testing says not really".

The Science Museum in London cancelled a lecture by him, while the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, branded his comments "racist propaganda".

Other scientists working in the field of molecular biology quickly distanced themselves from the comments, saying that it was not possible to draw such conclusions from the work that had been done on DNA.

The study of the DNA of Dr Watson who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for medicine adds another twist to the controversy surrounding the American scientist's comments.

In addition to the 16 per cent of his genes which were identified as likely to have come from a black ancestor of African descent, a further 9 per cent were likely to have come from an ancestor of Asian descent, the test indicated.

Another example is Stanton Friedman. He was a noted nuclear physicist, but he became one of the top "ufologists" in the world. He has written such books as FLYING SAUCERS & SCIENCE.

Another modern example is Ray Kurzweil, although I guess you could argue he isn't really a scientist but an inventor instead. But he and his company are responsible for a number of scientific advances in the fields of optical character recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech recognition:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

Even beyond philosophical arguments over whether a machine can "think" (see Philosophy of artificial intelligence), Kurzweil's ideas have generated much criticism within the scientific community and in the media. Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, has called the notion of a technological singularity "intelligent design for the IQ 140 people...This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me."[58]

VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has been one of the strongest critics of Kurzweil’s ideas, describing them as “cybernetic totalism” (totalitarianism), and has outlined his views on the culture surrounding Kurzweil’s predictions in an essay for Edge.org entitled One Half of a Manifesto.[59]

Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, has said of Kurzweil's and Hans Moravec's books: "It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."[60]

Even Galileo Galilei wasn't immune. He believed in astrology and described Kepler's theory that the moon caused the tides "useless fiction". And he claimed that the orbits of the planets couldn't possibly be elliptical because it was contrary to his sense of the circle being "perfect".

 

[classical_hero]

It's funny how so many brilliant scientists go completely off the deep end in areas other than their specialties.

This flows on in other areas in society also, where those who are quite brilliant, and yet they go off the deep end.