Deep Thought

Two watershed events happened this week. The first deals with change blindness, the second with Jeopardy. For CB, researchers have used AI to predict how we fail to see changes in a given scene.

"Researchers have used a computer-based model to predict what types of changes people are more likely to notice. The achievement sheds light on change blindness -- a failure of humans to detect seemingly obvious changes to scenes around them."

For Jeopardy lovers out there, IBM is putting up a digital challenger to see how AI, Neural Nets and parallel processing stacks up with some of Jeopardy's best contestants.

"IBM is working to build a computing system that can understand and answer complex questions with enough precision and speed to compete against some of the best Jeopardy! contestants out there.


This challenge is much more than a game. Jeopardy! demands knowledge of a broad range of topics including history, literature, politics, film, pop culture and science. What's more, Jeopardy! clues involve irony, riddles, analyzing subtle meaning and other complexities at which humans excel and computers traditionally do not. This, along with the speed at which contestants have to answer, makes Jeopardy! an enormous challenge for computing systems. 


Code-named "Watson" after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, the IBM computing system is designed to rival the human mind's ability to understand the actual meaning behind words, distinguish between relevant and irrelevant content, and ultimately, demonstrate confidence to deliver precise final answers."

What is  42?.