Rant of the Week

After the Performance

 

There has been a bit of noise this week about the IBM computer that supposedly defeated some of the top human Jeopardy Contestants.  I have rarely heard such unmitigated bullshit in the past few years.  Consider this:

The computer was allowed to store the IMDB and several encyclopedias including Wiki on it's hard drives.  The human was not even allowed to use Google.

The computer did not express the slightest desire to play the game or win.  The IBM programmers did.  They cheated by having the IMDB and Wiki with them when they played while the human contestants, of course, did not even have a dictionary.

Some of the observers were dazzled that the computer was able to understand a rhyming word-- what animal living in a mountainous region rhymes with "Obama"?  They were surprised that the computer had been programmed to "know" that llama rhymes with Obama?  You are indeed easily impressed.

 The odd thing is that the computer's performance hasn't even been all that impressive, even if it was actually a "performance" in any human sense of the word. Apparently, it is offered the question in text rather than verbally. 25 IBM programmers in four years couldn't do better than that? And why does it get a bye on the verbal questions? Human contestants can't ask for a print out of the question before they offered verbally to other contestants.

This is a scam.

The bottom line, of course, is that computers can't "think".  They will never think.   All they can do is process data.   The data and the processing are constructed by humans.  The computer contributes nothing but the illusion of autonomous operation.

People who think computers think are staring at the puppets at a puppet show and wondering what they do at night after the performance.

 

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