There is no time when the human imagination is freer than when we are engaged in play. It is often this freedom that feeds creativity and births innovation.
Man vs Computer
Deep Blue vs KasparovThere is an endless list of science fiction films that explore the hypothesis of a world where artificial intelligence becomes impossible for humans to control. Although we are nowhere near a robot apocalypse, developers have been happy to indulge us with plenty of man vs computer encounters. One of the most famous of these has to be Gary Kasparov’s face off with IBM’s Deep Blue computer.
Kasparov, considered to be one of the greatest chess players in history, initially beat the computer in 1996 only to be defeated by a single game in 1997. IBM had greatly improved Deep Blue between the two encounters which ensured victory for the computer. Kasparov complained that Deep Blue’s developers had an added advantage by being allowed to study hundreds of Kasparov’s games while IBM refused to let him study the computer’s earlier games against him.
Regardless of whether there was an advantage or not, the advances made in understanding massively parallel processing (the computer could explore up to 200 million chess positions per second) had an impact on several industries.
The extraordinary mathematical prowess that deep blue was capable of informed new software in the field of medical research, broad financial modelling and risk analysis, large database searches , and the performance of the sometimes enormous calculations that are required in the scientific field.
Watson and Jeopardy
Watson, another IBM creation, was a computer designed to play the game jeopardy. While the feats of Deep Blue are remarkable, the field of mathematical computation is one which computers were designed to excel in and is a natural use for them. Watson, on the other hand, needed to be able to respond to questions asked in natural language.
The computer had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured data (four terabytes of storage was needed!). The most remarkable innovation in Watson’s abilities was not only the creation of a new algorithm that could arrange the words in clues in different orders to find matching phrases, it was also its ability to execute thousands of these algorithms simultaneously.
The machine would choose the most prevalent matching results as its answer. In 2011 Watson beat two Jeopardy champions for a $1 million dollar prize.
Watson’s software systems have been used for utilization management decisions in lung cancer treatment. Other medical facilities use Watson’s ability to store and process large quantities of information. It speeds up and increases accuracy during treatment. Watson can sort through millions of pieces of information in seconds using only a few clue words. This can make it any medical practitioner or researcher’s ultimate sidekick.
Researchers agree that if Deep Blue and Watson’s respective mathematical and linguistic analysis abilities are combined, artificial intelligence may significantly improve doctor’s efficacy and decrease the time they need to spend with a single patient.
So who wins the battle?
For humans, it is intuitive to believe that artificial intelligence is finally outsmarting us. The truth is, however, that those smart systems were designed by humans in the first place. We are the ones behind the innovation and we understand how to build machines that enhance our capabilities.
In the same way that we use machines for web design, data recovery, medical procedures and banking, it is the professionals who design those systems who are ultimately at the helm of development.
Louisa TheartAbout the Author:
Louisa Theart is a freelance musician and writer. She is a technophobe of note and is forever grateful to the geeks who make our world more wondrous.
