• Beyond 'Jeopardy': Watson wins

    IBM via AFP - Getty Images

    IBM's Watson computer is made up of a cluster of 90 servers with a total of 2,880 processor cores.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    IBM's Watson supercomputer looks like the clear favorite to win this week's man-vs.-machine match on the "Jeopardy" TV game show in the wake of today's action. Right now, the score totals are $35,734 for Watson, vs. $10,400 and $4,800 for the game's two human champions. But even if by some miracle Watson doesn't take the million-dollar top prize, computer scientists say its performance will be judged a triumph for artificial intelligence.

    "Watson is clearly playing at a championship level," inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicts that A.I. will match human intelligence by the year 2029, told me today in an e-mail. "Note that it's only going to keep getting better. We cannot say that for unaided human intelligence."

    Kurzweil said Watson merits the high praise he bestowed upon the machine after seeing its performance in last month's public practice round. In his essay on KurzweilAI.net, he said computers had "not shown an ability to deal with the subtlety and complexity of language" ... until Watson came onto the scene.

    "Watson is a stunning example of the growing ability of computers to successfully invade this supposedly unique attribute of human intelligence," Kurzweil wrote. He said that level of language understanding, combined with a well-programmed aptitude for pattern recognition, would make Watson's descendants "far superior to a human."

    Alien intelligence
    Boris Katz, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who pioneered the development of natural-language question-answering systems, agrees that Watson is a wonder. "IBM did a fantastic job," he told me. But he said Watson's foibles also show that a computer's brand of intelligence is still alien to us.

    When Watson is good, it's very, very good. But when it is bad, it's horrid. For example, one of the clues dropped during a practice round was: "This trusted friend is the first non-dairy powdered creamer." The correct answer was "Coffee-mate," but Watson gave a nonsensical non-non-dairy reply: "What is milk?"

    Another example: On Monday, "Jeopardy" rival Ken Jennings gave a wrong answer for the decade when Oreo cookies were introduced (the '20s), and Watson followed up with what was basically the same answer. ("What is 1920s?") It was left to the third contestant, Brad Rutter, to come up with the right answer (the 1910s). Expert observers assume that Watson flubbed the answer because it didn't catch the fact that the '20s and the 1920s were just two different ways to refer to the same decade.

    "When you look at the blunders, you realize that they did not build a machine that thinks like us," Katz said. "The success of Watson does not bring us closer to the understanding of human intelligence. When we observe it making these mistakes, that should remind all of us that this problem is still with us, and it's waiting to be solved."

    Overconfident computer?
    Watson draws upon 15 trillion bytes of information in its memory banks, the equivalent of 200 million pages of text, and ranks the  potential answers for a given clue using 2,880 parallel processor cores in its 90 computer servers. If the highest-scoring answer exceeds its built-in "confidence threshold," it'll buzz in. If no answer scores high enough to reach the threshold, Watson will keep mum. At least theoretically.

    "We're seeing already that there are times when Watson really doesn't have enough information to have a good answer, but has the 'confidence' to give an answer anyway," said Eric Nyberg, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University who helped program the supercomputer.

    Despite Watson's occasional missteps, Nyberg is proud of the computer's overall prowess, as well as the speed with which it's answering the "Jeopardy" questions. "I was pleasantly surprised that Watson was able to buzz in against Ken [Jennings], because in all of 'Jeopardy,' he's the guy with the fastest trigger finger," he told me.

    Today, during an interview on MSNBC, Jennings acknowledged that Watson has "an edge on that buzzer that human reflexes have a hard time keeping up with." He also acknowledged that the pressure was on, big time, going into the final round. (Jennings actually knows who won, since the three shows were taped last month under tight security.)

     "The computer can't get stage fright, it can't get discouraged or frustrated. It's like 'Terminator,' it's just going to keep coming," Jennings said. "And so the human race is going to have to play probably aggressively here — big bets where necessary, play recklessly to win." 

    On Wednesday, TV viewers will find out how this particular man-vs.-machine match ends. But the computer scientists emphasized that this is just the beginning for Watson and its successors. "The fact that it's this fast, and this accurate, and its abilities allow it to do this well at 'Jeopardy' means that question-answering technology is really ready for prime time," Nyberg said.

    Watson was built to serve up quiz-show knowledge, but those question-answering capabilities would probably be most valuable in specialized fields such as medicine and law. Watson's kin could help us puny humans sift through millions of possibilities and come up with the five or six best medical diagnoses, or legal precedents, or chemical configurations, or ... well, you name it.

    "We're not thinking about applications where there isn't a human in the loop," Nyberg said. "We're definitely talking about an intelligent information agent that's working with a human."

    What do you think? Will Watson win this week's showdown? Will question-answering machines become our most reliable advisers? Or will this turn into a replay of "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines"? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

    Correction for 12:20 a.m. ET Feb. 16: Error! Error! I've fixed the humans' totals at the end of the first game, and have corrected The Associated Press' figures in the referenced story as well.

    More human-vs.-machine matches:

    Join the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the blog's Facebook page or following b0yle on Twitter.

  • How near is the Singularity?

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    The Singularity is back in the spotlight, thanks to a Time cover story focusing on inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil and his forecast that "the end of human civilization as we know it" will come in about 35 years ... just as Kurzweil is nearing his 100th birthday.

    Kurzweil is doing everything in his power to make sure he's ready for the big event, which he calls the Singularity. He takes 150 pills a day, keeps himself in shape and looks forward to the day when he can start re-engineering his own body for immortality. And he's not alone. Kurzweil has been spreading the word about the Singularity in a series of books and two documentaries ("The Singularity Is Near" and "Transcendent Man") as well as academic programs at Singularity University in California's Silicon Valley.

    Kurzweil projects that computers will match human brain power by around the year 2030, opening the way for a rapid merging of electronic and biological intelligence. Around the year 2045, that merger will lead to a worldwide transformation so dramatic that its follow-on effects would be hard to predict. (Hence the term "singularity.")

    "It's a little alarmist, but the idea is that ... it's a kind of cyborgian era, when there's a combination of man and machine. Even now, Parkinson's patients have neural implants in their brain, basically," Time's managing editor, Richard Stengel, said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" today. "Why couldn't you be doing that for regular folks, to increase memory, bandwidth, all of that kind of stuff?"

    The development of a search-engine / smart-phone / machine-translator system that's wired directly into our brains would certainly mark a turning point. I referred to the Bluetooth/Google/Babelfish implant four years ago, but the idea goes back at least to the "microsofts" described by William Gibson in his 1984 novel "Neuromancer."

    Would such devices count as the merging of man and machine? Is the Singularity nearer than we think? I'm betting that the human-vs.-machine divide will become fuzzier and fuzzier — thanks to gimmicks such as Wafaa Bilal's webcam implant and next week's "Jeopardy" face-off as well as more substantive developments. What's your bet? Will the Singularity still be science fiction in 2045? Or will it be ancient history?

    More on the Singularity:

    Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

  • Can business ideas benefit billions?

    Agropolis

    An artist's conception shows a supermarket that features food products grown on the premises through vertical farming. Such products could range from fruits and vegetables to farmed fish and lab-grown meat.

    Tech-savvy entrepreneurs are aiming to find out whether vertical-farm markets, 3-D printers and other innovations can do some good for more than a billion people over the next decade … and do well enough to earn profits in the process. The ventures were born during a summer session at Singularity University in California's Silicon Valley, and announced by the university's founders just today.

    Singularity U. started out three years ago as an idea that bounced around between inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil (author of "The Singularity Is Near") and X Prize Foundation co-founder Peter Diamandis. The academic institution's graduate students pay $25,000 (minus scholarships) for a 10-week summer program aimed at filling them in on the promise of exponentially growing information technologies — a concept that Kurzweil is so keen on that I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up getting abbreviated to EGITs ("egg-its").

    The way Kurzweil sees it, many walks of life are amenable to exponential acceleration — not just computer hardware, where the concept manifests itself as Moore's Law, but medical advances and energy possibilities as well. Kurzweil believes information technology will eventually help us crack the codes of life and take advantage of the terawatts of solar power hitting our planet. "Ultimately it transforms all these other areas," Kurzweil said today during a video briefing.

    Vertical farm

    Dickson Despommier / Verticalfarm

    An artist's conception shows the "Living Tower" vertical farm concept. Learn more about vertical farming..

    So how do EGITS apply to entrepreneurship? Diamandis observed that most business ideas are based on technology as it is, not technologies as they will be. "It takes three or four years to bring a business to market, and by that time, it's obsolete," he said. During the graduate program, students are encouraged to think outside the box, or at least think inside an exponentially growing box.

    Last year, as part of Singularity U.'s "10 to the Ninth Plus" project, the students came up with four ideas for spin-off ventures that they thought could improve the lives of at least a billion people over the next 10 years — including Getaround and CiviGuard. Getaround is an online rental service aimed at maximizing the usage of private automotive vehicles. "Their goal is to do for automobiles what cloud computing does for computers," Kurzweil explained. CiviGuard is working to set up a system for two-way emergency communication, linking victims with emergency responders.

    This year's graduate students produced about a dozen ideas, aimed at providing more abundant food, cleaner energy, cleaner water, improved access to space and more sustainable use of technology (a concept dubbed "upcycling"). Here's the full lineup:

    Food: A venture called Agropolis aims to put hydroponics and vertical farming to work on a local scale. "This particular project ... deals with producing little modules that can be decentralized," Kurzweil said. One potential application would be to grow produce as well as farm-bred tilapia fish and bioengineered meat inside a multistory building, and sell the foodstuffs at a market located in the same building. "They're off at this point to start up a company," Diamandis said.

    "We have a schedule for research, and we're talking with partners to build a prototype," team member Maggie Jack told me. She said the first prototype facilities would be set up in California and India — but there's lots that has to be done before taking that step. "We're working on this kind of in our part time, spare time, until the winter," said Jack, who is a program manager for San Francisco-based Social Venture Technology Group.  

    Energy: Another potential startup is Amunda, which would seek to set up small-scale markets in energy for the developing world. "A group can basically say, 'We have 500 households that need this many kilowatts per day,'" Diamandis said. Potential energy providers could then bid to provide the energy for that market. Online tools, such as a "Google Earth with a marketing overlay," could facilitate such markets, Diamandis said.

    Water: One team project, dubbed Naishio, would enlist converging technologies (bio plus nano plus solar) to desalinate seawater more efficiently. Former NASA astronaut Dan Barry, Singularity U.'s faculty head, thinks technological convergence was a key to success. "That's where it really starts to get exciting and explodes for me," he said today. Other ventures include Sensoria, which focuses on biology-based sensor technologies to test water purity; and H2020, which would set up an online destination about water resources.

    Space: Made in Space would enlist 3-D printers to make spare parts for spacecraft such as the International Space Station, rather than having to ship up tons of parts just in case something breaks. "You just launch the goo, the plastic, the material that you're going to print parts out of," Barry said. That could dramatically reduce the amount of mass that has to be launched to support a particular mission. "It can be the difference between a Mars mission that gets funded and goes, versus one that's too expensive and too difficult to do," Barry said.

    Another venture is working with NASA's Ames Research Center and the California Institute of Technology to develop a beamed-energy system that would send up laser light or microwaves to power spacecraft. "That system has the potential to be on the order of 50 to 100 times more efficient than traditional launch vehicles," Diamandis said. Still other teams came up with ideas to bioengineer organisms for extraterrestrial environments, or to do low-cost biological research in space.

    Upcycling: The Fre3dom team is working on a 3-D printing process that would allow local communities in the developing world to make their own spare parts for broken-down equipment. "They've identified a new bioplastic that would work well with the existing cutting-edge generation of 3-D printers," Kurzweil said. Other teams are trying to come up with better methods to extract valuable metals from electronic waste (BioMine) and create more efficient markets for products that one company might see as industrial waste (i2cycle).

    All these ideas will require financing to be turned into realities, of course, and part of Singularity U.'s appeal is that venture capital types (from companies such as ePlanet Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers)  have been involved in the summer session alongside the entrepreneurs. That's part of the reason why the students are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for 10 weeks of summer school.

    If you were an investor, which ideas would you bet on? If you were a philanthropist, which causes would you support? What challenges would you want to see next year's Singularity U. graduate students address? Or do you think there are better ways to do good while doing well? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

    Join the Cosmic Log corps by signing up as my Facebook friend or hooking up on Twitter. And if you really want to be friendly, ask me about "The Case for Pluto."

  • Daily dose of science on the Web

  • from:The New York Times

    In the Singularity movement, humans are so yesterday

    Is Singularitism a religion, a scientific life-extension strategy, an old-boy's network or the wave of the future? Maybe all of the above, based on this feature about the Singularity University at work. It's nice to have such optimism in technology, but there's also something oddly off-putting about all this... It's the same spidey-sense tingle I get about Nietzschean supermanism and Scientology. Particularly at $15,000 for a nine-day course.