Next General Meeting:
Bruce Preston—Artificial Intelligence
Date: June 5, 2012, 7 p.m.
Location: Danbury Hospital Auditorium,
24 Hospital Ave, Danbury, doors open at 6:30 p.m.

Not So Elementary, My Dear Watson

By Allan Ostergren

DACS members know Bruce Preston as an inspired SIG leader and a seasoned computer consultant and database designer who has written about and hosted numerous General Meeting presentations on consumer software and problem solving. For our July program he took on a more esoteric topic: artificial intelligence, and due to a last minute change in schedule, he agreed to move it forward to our next meeting on June 5.

From the time our earliest ancestors left the trees for the savannah, they dreamed of artificial beings that thought like them but had superhuman powers. However, it wasn't until the desperate struggles of World War 2 that intelligence analysts, led by Alan Turing, began to lay out endless strings of ones and zeroes to process the mathematical computations needed to crack the complexity of the German Enigma code.

Electronic computers have evolved since the 1940's, and personal computers became readily available in the early 1980's. And following Moore's Law, they have become faster and ever more powerful. Software makes them more intuitive and user friendly, and capable of amazing feats. But are they intelligent in their own right, and could mankind clone itself with a race of cyber sapiens running on a life force made up of ones and zeroes?

In a 1950 paper, Turing addressed the question of whether machines can think, concluding that digital processing could make them invincible in solving computational problems. Then, in 1956, John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), defined as "the study and design of intelligent agents" (IA). A thinking machine becomes "intelligent" through sensors and logical instructions that make it aware of its environment and able to "learn" from its behavior.

Although computers were highly efficient at crunching facts and figures, enabling them to reason and react independently would require a whole new branch of cybernetics and logic theory. Somehow, all the complexity of human reasoning, emotion  and experience, as well as the fine innuendo of language and symbols, seemed too complex to render into bits and bytes. Early initiatives at the Defense Department withered and were replaced by more limited projects like smart car competitions. At the same time, fictional imagination conjured other, more sinister consequences of cyber science: computers that could take over the world ("Colossus: the Forbin Project"), have a nervous breakdown ("2001: A Space Odyssey"), or empower their creators to self-destruct ("Forbidden Planet").

In recent years, IBM has taken on the challenge through super computers, primed with vast databases of information and designed to analyze billions of data bytes per second. In 1997, Deep Blue, a chess playing computer defeated world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game competition, and only last year, IBM's Watson overwhelmed the Jeopardy! two greatest money winners. However, these victories were not accomplished by superior reasoning, but by brute force and lightning speed.

For his presentation, Bruce will explore the path to creating intelligent machines—through circuits, stored programs, logic and machine learning. He will explain how programmers move information by switches and circuits and impose a complex structure and discipline through a myriad of rules and algorithms. He will then proceed to explain how computers "learn" meaning and context from rules programmed into them.

Bruce will show how programmers at IBM "taught" their respective computers to compete with human intellect. Deep Blue was taught the rules of chess and given a book of opening moves and end game moves—the rest was left to brute force computation. Watson received extensive lessons on the variations of English idioms and information trivia. Bruce will then compare these with simpler machine learning tools, like voice recognition software, and explore the future implications of the Watson project. Finally, he will cap the show with a bonus demonstration of Siri, Apple's intelligent personal assistant for the iPhone.

But perhaps most significantly, at the end of the presentation Bruce will do what no computer has done: answer your enthusiastic questions.

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DACS meetings are held at the Danbury Hospital auditorium. (Click here for directions and parking information.)

Activities begin at 6:30 p.m. with registration and casual networking. The meeting starts at 7:00 p.m. with a question and answer period (Ask DACS), followed by announcements and a short break. The featured evening presentation begins at 8:00. The meeting is scheduled to adjourn at 9:30 p.m.

DACS General Meetings are free and open to the public. Members and prior attendees are encouraged to extend invitations to anyone interested in this topic.

Danbury Area Computer Society (DACS) is a registered nonprofit and has been serving the region since 1990.

 


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