Roger Ewing's Blog

Is it possible to create a computer that can solve problems like humans, using intelligence?

By Roger Ewing

In his book Leviathan, English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, science is reason, and “Reason is nothing but Reckoning..”.  Hobbes was describing either a computer and/or the human brain when he wrote those words in 1651.

Thomas Hobbes

Reckoning is computation and isn’t that what brains and computers do?  And isn’t thinking just another term for computing?  Artificial Intelligence has been described as the quality of a machine to have a mind, consciousness and a mental state.  How to make a machine exhibit these qualities is the question on the minds of Google engineers as they steer the starship Google into the next decade.  The magic of the search and the man-machine interface has become the new frontier of computer science.

John Battelle, in  his book The Search, writes of the “Database of Intentions”.  Batelle says search is the force driving the web forward and the ability of machines to understand what people are looking for is critical.

The capability of a computer to intuitively interpret our intentions is the Holy Grail of search.  Search is becoming less about finding something, and more about understanding something.

The Turing Test

Simply stated, the Turing Test is the ability of a machine to demonstrate intelligence.  Alan Turing in his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, contemplates the question “can machines think?”  The test goes like this. A human interrogator engages in a conversation with another human and a machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are separated from one another in different locations. If the interrogator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test and is therefore deemed intelligent.

The Loebner Prize

Hugh Loebner of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies sponsors a contest each year in which he offers a cash prize of $100,000 to the first computer that can pass the Turing Test.  Thus far, the Gold (audio and visual) and the Silver (text only) have never been won.

However, Loebner has awarded the bronze medal every year for the computer that demonstrates the “most human” conversation among that year’s entries.  Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (A.L.I.C.E.) won the bronze award three times (2000, 2001, 2004) and AI Jabberwacky won in 2005 and 2006.

Space Odyssey

Lets cut to the chase.  Can a machine have emotions, self awareness, creativity, benevolence, or hostility?  Can a machine have a soul?  Do we need to be concerned that some day a computer like Hal, from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, will take control and attempt to extinguish our life force?  No, the answer is much more benign.

Battelle believes search will become intelligent as a result of clever algorithms that leverage the multi-millions of daily transactions, behaviors and links that compose the foundation of the web, The Database of Intentions.

What does the world want?

Google is determined to find out.

Copyright © by Roger Patrick Ewing, all rights reserved.