For the last two decades, human cognitive superiority had a distinctive sound: the soft click of stones placed on a wooden Go board. But once again, artificial intelligence is asserting its domination over gray matter.
One of the proving grounds for artificial intelligence is games. Classic games have a fixed set of rules, and these make it easier for researchers to develop new techniques and algorithms that enable computers to play (and hopefully win) various games.
This spring marked the 40th anniversary of HAL, the conversational computer that was brought to life in the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Forty years after “2001,” how close are we to talking to a computer? Current applications of speech technology are a far cry from HAL.
In 1965, artificial intelligence innovator Herbert Simon said that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.” Two years later, MIT researcher Marvin Minsky predicted, “Within a generation … the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved.” … Yet, here we are, decades later and what has artificial intelligence done for us lately? If you define artificial intelligence as self-aware, self-learning, mobile systems, then artificial intelligence has been a huge disappointment.
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