Andy Judkis wrote:
I'm really excited about the upcoming Jeopardy! shows next week
(Mon-Wed) with champion human players facing off against IBM's Watson.
It's been a great opportunity to get students to think about what
Moore's law means, and how computer technology is likely to affect their
lives over the next few decades. Obviously the IBM hype machine is in
overdrive, but I think they've earned the right.
Haven't heard about Watson before. It seems to be a quiz solving
machine. There is a long history of teaching computer to play the games
of humans - and almost always the computers are beating us pretty soon.
There still is one notable exception being the oriental game of Go.
Creating a relatively strong playing programme has taken about 20 years
longer than in the case of chess, and they still don't beat professional
players on the standard (19x19) grid - not without a large handicap at
least. Obviously pattern recognition and strategy of professional human
players is still out of reach in this case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go
Interestingly the breakthrough achievement leading to todays much
stronger programmes (only a couple of years back) did not come by
mimicking human reasoning about the next move. Instead, the merit of a
move is evaluated by a monte-carlo approach: The board is filled with
random moves until the machine can tell who wins. This is repeated
thousands of times and so by sheer statistics the relative value of the
next move is assessed. This kind of evaluation process is absolutely not
what a human player is doing or capable of doing in his head. So there
is no hope of computers teaching us how to play better Go ;-), at least
not in the sense of explaining to us why they made a certain move.
Cheers
Christian
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