First Question : Where is the blue fairy ?
Wonder what it would say!
IBM is exposing the super computer brain that crushed puny humans in a TV quiz show to the entire internet. Big Blue announced its IBM Watson Developers Cloud on Thursday, inviting all comers to build big data apps that tap the cognitive powers of its Watson super computer. The idea is to tempt application authors keen on …
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one silly, one serious:
"Bathed in his currents of liquid helium, self-contained, immobile, vastly well informed by every mechanical sense: Shalmaneser. Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, 'Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.'" (John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar)
Seriously though, this seems pretty cool. I could see this being akin to databases enabling hordes of engineers and *gasp* business people who weren't experts in efficient storage and retrieval, redundancy, coherence modeling, multithreading, etc. to take advantage of concerted effort by a small few who are. Machine learning has way more cool applications than the people who understand it deeply enough to implement could possibly support piecemeal, and they are unlikely to understand all the subdomains in great enough detail to be the right people to guide that work. I'll be very interested to see how this develops.
I'm thinking of software to play "Liza" for survivors of severe Traumatic Brain Injury. Something to set them in some sort of social environment where "Liza" isn't going to suffer a lapse of patience ever, something to get the TBI survivor's brain adding new neurons.
Quick, where do I sign?