There was a long article about artificial intelligence (AI) in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html It was pretty good, with some technical detail. You will find more detail in recent Sci. Am. article by two of the leading people in the field. I can't find it on line . . . There has been an important breakthrough with neural networks. They have been around for decades, going back to the 1950s I think. The difference is they are now many orders of magnitude larger, and they are multi-level, with the output of one network connected to the input of another. This was the technique that led to a computer beating the world champion in go. The NYT reports that Google has applied this to their translation software, resulting in dramatic improvements. In a few months, the quality of the translations improved as much as it did in 10 years with the older technology. The article quotes an example. This sentence in Spanish by Borges: Uno no es lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha leído. The old Google translate system rendered this: One is not what is for what he writes, but for what he has read. The new one: You are not what you write, but what you have read. I ran some Japanese and some English text through the latest Google translate. This is mainly text that I translated myself. The new Google translate is remarkable. A little unnerving. Because, you see, if you run some of my translated essays you will see that I took liberties, adding information I thought would help a native speaker understand. These are not literal or exact translations. Since I wrote the original text myself, I am allowed to to that. But, I also did it with Mike McKubre's paper. I am a little worried that someone may call me out on it! Sooner or later, Google's computers will be getting in touch with me, calling me out. Google sells a gadget that sits in the room listening to your conversations, awaiting your commands, the Google Home: https://madeby.google.com/home/ I can see the day coming when the Google Home speaker will blare out: "ROTHWELL! Get over here. What is the meaning of this?!? McKubre wrote 'I was tasked' and you have it: 'the conference organizers asked me to . . .' We are now in the process of reviewing all of your work going back to 1998, which will henceforth be called Calendar Year 1 of Our Lord Google." http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusionb.pdf http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/McKubreMCHcoldfusionc.pdf - Jed
