Mark Gibbs <mgi...@gibbs.com> wrote:
> What if Watson concludes LENR is a load of baloney? > Seriously? That would not surprise me. I have been reading about Watson and the methodology, because I am interested in natural language processing, translation and so on. Watson does not do much synthesizing. It parses the natural language sources, determines what they "mean" (in a sense) and then matches them to the inquiry. That's fabulous, and useful, but not creative. Suppose you input into Watson only mass media sources, the Scientific American, Nature and a few other leading journals. You do not add anything from J. Electroanal. Chem. or other specialized journals that have actual papers about cold fusion. Then you ask Watson "what is cold fusion." It would say something similar to what Ouellette wrote; i.e., it is pathological science, never replicated, blah, blah, blah: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/2012/10/29/genie-in-a-bottle-the-case-against-cold-fusion/ This article, along with everything else in the Sci. Am. and Nature about cold fusion, is a long string of fact-free nonsense, but it is perfectly grammatical and it could be parsed and regurgitated by Watson. Ouellette herself is essentially acting as a computer. She does no fact checking. She does not try to eliminate internal inconsistencies. She simply parrots whatever she read in Wikipedia, or some other Internet sewer. Watson echoes what it reads. If you were to input all of the papers at LENR-CANR.org into Watson than its response would echo actual, peer-reviewed scientific literature, and the conclusions therein, which are overwhelmingly positive. Note that I was only kidding in the first message in this thread. There is no chance Watson would actually synthesize a general view of cancer treatment, similar to the way a human epidemiologist would. I think it will only search out specific papers and studies to address specific questions. It does actually "understand" the conclusions in these paper at some level, since it can tell that a statement is positive or negative; i.e., treatment X is likely to be effective for disease Y. (Or that it has not been found effective.) What it cannot do is conclude that "thousands of papers have statements describing effective treatments, but a study made outside the field by epidemiologists proves that all of these papers are exaggerated or wrong." That is a very high level of generalization -- or abstraction if you will. That would be finding an answer far afield of the set of usual answers, with no contextual clues or linked keywords. I do not think Watson is capable of it. I suppose that someday computers will be capable of this. - Jed
