Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence — page 3
Watson does not have a squishy pinkish gray brain made of cells and neurons Instead its intelligence comes from a room full of whirring machinery 750 powerful computer servers linked in a high speed network cooled by large refrigerator units The servers provide 15 terabytes of memory and the computing power of 2 800 regular computers During the Jeopardy game Watson was not linked to the Internet Instead it accessed millions of pages of research material loaded onto its servers books movie scripts encyclopedias and more How could Watson possibly get an answer wrong with so much information at its disposal The tricky part for Watson was not recalling trivia it was understanding the clues Learning Natural Language Anyone who has ever tried to learn a new language knows words can be tricky Some words and phrases mean more than one thing For example consider these two sentences An athlete runs on a track and A car runs on gas The meanings of run and on are different in each sentence After all the car is not scampering across a pool of gas It is very difficult to teach a computer which meaning applies in any particular sentence Scientists who work on artificial intelligence A refer to the sentences people speak every day as natural language Typically computers follow instructions in programming languages which are written in code In these computer languages the words must be very precise Each word or symbol means one thing But most people do not know how to write code Therefore a computer that can understand natural language makes communication between people and machines easier and more straightforward for everyone 6