Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Google goes to the top of the language class - ZDNet.co.uk

Google goes to the top of the language class - ZDNet.co.uk: "Google's machine translation wasn't perfect, but it was well ahead of the competition. On a scale from zero to one, the company's software scored 0.5137 on the Arabic tests and 0.3531 on the Chinese tests. In Arabic, the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute came in second with a .4657 and second in Chinese with .3073. IBM scored .4646 on Arabic and .2571 on Chinese."


Sunday, October 05, 2008

Next Week's Turing Test

'Intelligent' computers put to the test | Technology | The Observer: "In the 'Turing test' a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer's responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be 'thinking'.

No machine has yet passed the test devised by Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War. But at 9am next Sunday, six computer programs - 'artificial conversational entities' - will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognised 'thinking' machine. If any program succeeds, it is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be 'conscious' - and if humans should have the 'right' to switch it off."