For the few of us who actually watched Jeopardy, Watson is a familiar name. The supercomputer bordering on artificial intelligence was pit against contestants in the game show about a year ago, effectively trouncing them in every category. It even managed to make a couple cheeky remarks toward Trebek. Apparently, IBM is bent on driving us closer to the synthetic takeover of mankind by texting it to curse.
Yesterday, IBM released a report about their testing of Watson's conversation ability, with something called the "Turing test." Basically, it evaluates Watson's capacity to match natural conversation among humans to verify actual thought, making awkward small talk a scientific breakthrough. According to initial tests, Watson passed, but IBM scientist Eric Brown decided to take it a little further.
Brown wanted to see if Watson was not only able to converse, but able to incorporate subtle nuances and slang into a conversation. To achieve this, he allowed Watson to roam through the Urban Dictionary for a while (For those unfamiliar, basically every "politically incorrect" term known to man resides here), and observe the results. The computer easily integrated its contents with UD, but then shocked scientists when it called "bullsh*t" when one of the scientists spoke to it. While hilarious, this shows that Watson was unable to differ between polite and impolite language. The researchers installed a language filter, but eventually had to wipe the entire UB database from its memory. First, cursing. Tomorrow, the world!
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