Friday, November 02, 2007

This child learned algorithms before A for Apple

The kid in question is AI (Artificial Intelligence) - pet peeve of the ‘technology will surpass human thinking school.
I must confess that AI has taken long to evolve and no-believers still say that look at that clumsy Robot ‘it’ still cannot tell a Cat from a Dog but I would tend to agree with what Ray Kurzweil has to say about the evolution of AI. It is learning the bigger things first – detecting patterns in what we now popularly know as algorithms. This is a kind of evolution like the baby first learns to crawl, then walk, talk, then read write and finally do engineering or statistics and write codes patterns etc. AI is learning almost entirely the other way round. It is learning to map patterns in an ocean of numbers and then stepping towards reading and writing and perhaps the final frontier would be the Cat and Dog difference. We must acknowledge that AIs evolution is a function of its application. We do not need computers to tell a Dog from a Cat but we do want the child to know which is which right?

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