Computers can beat humans. At least that’s the news as Watson, the IBM supercomputer, took down its human competition on Jeopardy last week, with champion Ken Jennings musing, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”
So it begins. Next thing you know we’ll be battling the machines and fighting for our very survival – ala The Terminator or The Matrix. At least, unless you think about it a bit more. Even in those movies, and other tales of robots and computers taking over, the machines have flaws. They lack inspiration and originality and can’t technically “think” for themselves. And humans eventually win in the end. So will the machines even get their day in the sun? Probably not.
Watson won because he seemingly knows “everything,” but it took humans to put it there. And for the record, Watson wasn’t always right, nor was he always the fastest on the draw. He may have beaten the humans at trivia, and while computers can outplay grandmasters in chess, the truth is that computers often cheat.
Say it ain’t so Joe, but that’s the truth. Computers need to cheat to compete against human players, and this is something I know all too well. Part of my beat involves covering the electronic entertainment industry – the world of video games – and every year we see the latest, greatest in new innovation. But when you pull back the curtain, you see that the wizard isn’t really that wonderful after all. Game designers need to give the computer the advantage, not the players.
Single player games are heavily scripted and essentially linear. So what makes the adventure hard isn’t the fact the computer is better than the human, it is that the computer program knows that the character will eventually do something that triggers a response. Thus the computer has a leg up. All the computer can do is slow down the progress, but with enough time the humans can win. Additionally, smart players can find design flaws that the designers didn’t think about and which the computer might not even know is there.
In “multiplayer” most players are playing against other humans – and this competition is greater than anything the computer can throw at you. When the other “players” aren’t exactly human, but are computer controlled, the computer has to cheat to compete – or it loses, and it loses badly. Computer drivers in a racing game are programmed to take the perfect line, so they don’t need to break as much going into a turn. Computer generals in a strategy game know the rock-paper-scissors formula so well that once a human understands it, the computer loses its advantage. That’s why humans can typically beat the computer once they master the formula.
Thus the computers can’t really enslave us. But yet we will still become ever dependent on the machines, especially in the world of busienss. We use them to communicate, to work, to play (as the game reference above shows) and to be further entertained. And yet all of this isn’t even because of the computers as much as people finding a use for the technology.
A hundred years ago the automobile was a plaything of the rich. Today most Americans are utterly dependent on cars – yet no one ever worried about the cars taking over. Of course cars don’t think – or at least they didn’t think. Today cars do some thinking, it seems, at least in terms of being more efficient in how they operate and how they perform.
Yet, computers don’t really think either. Watson didn’t need to cheat to win, he only needed to pull up facts that were stored within. But could Watson accurately predict trends in the stock market, could Watson come up with a business strategy, or could Watson even win a game of chess? The answer for all is maybe, but it would all depend on what information Watson was given. And that is the key. Watson only can do what Watson is programmed to do.
So until computers can learn to learn without being given the answer, there is no reason to worry about having computer overlords. It is also the reason why as we become more dependent on technology in our small offices, we should know that we still control it.
The post Computer Beats Humans at Jeopardy, but Don’t Rule Out Humans Yet appeared first on AllBusiness.com
The post Computer Beats Humans at Jeopardy, but Don’t Rule Out Humans Yet appeared first on AllBusiness.com.