A It was not quite a foregone
conclusion, but all the smart money was on the machine. Since the first
rehearsal over a year ago, it had become apparent that Watson—a supercomputer
built by IBM to decode tricky questions posed in English and answer them
correctly within seconds—would trounce the smartest of human challengers. And so
it did earlier this week, following a three-day contest against the two most
successful human champions of all time on 'Jeopardy!', a popular quiz game aired
on American television. By the end of the contest, Watson had accumulated over
$77,000 in winnings, compared with $24,000 and $21,600 for the two human
champions. IBM donated the $1m in special prize money to charity, while the two
human contestants gave half their runner-up awards away.
B IBM has a long tradition of setting 'grand challenges' for itself—as a
way of driving internal research and innovation as well as demonstrating its
technical smarts to the outside world. A previous challenge was the chess match
staged in 1997 between IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer and the then world
champion, Garry Kasparov. As shocking as it seemed at the time, a computer
capable of beating the best chess-player in the world proved only that the
machine had enough computational horsepower to perform the rapid logical
analysis needed to cope with the combinatorial explosion of moves and
counter-moves. In no way did it demonstrate that Deep Blue was doing something
even vaguely intelligent. C Even so, defeating a
grandmaster at chess was child's play compared with challenging a quiz show
famous for offering clues laden with ambiguity, irony, wit and double meaning as
well as riddles and puns—things that humans find tricky enough to fathom, let
alone answer. Getting a mere number-cruncher to do so had long been thought
impossible. The ability to parse the nested structure of language to extract
context and meaning, and then use such concepts to create other linguistic
structures, is what human intelligence is supposed to be all about.
D Four years in the making, Watson is the brainchild of David
Ferrucci, head of the DeepQA project at IBM's research centre in Yorktown
Heights, New York. Dr. Ferrucci and his team have been using search, semantics
and natural-language processing technologies to improve the way computers handle
questions and answers in plain English. That is easier said than done. In
parsing a question, a computer has to decide what is the verb, the subject, the
object, the preposition as well as the object of the preposition. It must
disambiguate words with multiple meanings, by taking into account any context it
can recognise. When people talk among themselves, they bring so much contextual
awareness to the conversation that answers become obvious. 'The computer
struggles with that,' says Dr. Ferrucci. E Another
problem for the computer is copying the facility the human brain has to use
experience—based short-cuts (heuristics) to perform tasks. Computers have to do
this using lengthy step-by-step procedures (algorithms). According to Dr.
Ferrucci, it would take two hours for one of the fastest processors to answer a
simple natural-language question. To stand any chance of winning, contestants on
'Jeopardy!' have to hit the buzzer with a correct answer within three seconds.
For that reason, Watson was endowed with no fewer than 2,880 Power 750 chips
spread over 90 servers. Flat out, the machine can perform 80 trillion
calculations a second. For comparison's sake, a modern PC can manage around 100
billion calculations a second. F For the contest, Watson
had to rely entirely on its own resources. That meant no searching the Internet
for answers or asking humans for help. Instead, it used more than 100 different
algorithms to parse the natural-language questions and interrogate the 15
trillion bytes of trivia stored in its memory banks—equivalent to 200m pages of
text. In most cases, Watson could dredge up answers quicker than either of its
two human rivals. When it was not sure of the answer, the computer simply shut
up rather than risk losing the bet. That way, it avoided impulsive behaviour
that cost its opponents points. G Your correspondent
finds it rather encouraging that a machine has beaten the best in the business.
After all, getting a computer to converse with humans in their own language has
been an elusive goal of artificial intelligence for decades. Making it happen
says more about human achievement than anything spooky about machine dominance.
And should a machine manage the feat without the human participants in the
conversation realising they are not talking to another person, then the machine
would pass the famous test for artificial intelligence devised in 1950 by Alan
Turing, a British mathematician famous for cracking the Enigma and Lorenz
ciphers during the second world war. H It is only a
matter of time before a computer passes the Turing Test. It will not be Watson,
but one of its successors doubtless will. Ray Kurzweil, a serial innovator,
engineer and prognosticator, believes it will happen by 2029. He notes that it
was only five years after the massive and hugely expensive Deep Blue beat Mr.
Kasparov in 1997 that Deep Fritz was able to achieve the same level of
performance by combining the power of just eight personal computers. In part,
that was because of the inexorable effects of Moore's Law halving the
price/performance of computing every 18 months. It was also due to the vast
improvements in pattern-recognition software used to make the crucial
tree-pruning decisions that determine successful moves and countermoves in
chess. I Now that the price/performance of computers has
accelerated to a halving every 12 months, Mr. Kurzweil expects a single server
to do the job of Watson's 90 servers within seven years—and by a PC within a
decade. If cloud computing fulfils its promise, then bursts of Watson-like
performance could be available to the public at nominal cost even sooner. Mr.
Kurzweil believes that once computers master human levels of pattern recognition
and language understanding, they will leave mankind way behind. By then, they
will have combined the human skills of language and pattern recognition with
their own unique ability to master vast corpora of knowledge.
J Will that mean game over for humans—with robots keeping people around
merely as pets? 'Absolutely not', says Oren Etzioni, director of the Turing
Centre at the University of Washington in Seattle. But it does mean, he notes,
that computers will be able to achieve vastly more than they can today. For a
start, super-smart machines capable of answering questions in English (or any
other natural language) will change search engines out of all recognition. No
longer will Google and Bing bombard users with hundreds or even thousands of
dumb links to dubious sources. Instead, people will get the unique and
meaningful answers they are seeking.
填空题
Reading passage 2 has ten paragraphs, A-J.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-J, in boxes on your answer sheet.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
the funded support from competitors in the contest
填空题
the reasons for the progress of computers
填空题
the name of a machine that can speak English
填空题
the positive attitude to the question whether machines can replace human beings
填空题
the range of technologies that are used to develop the English-speaking machine
填空题
the long-standing target of IBM on its brand development
填空题
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 2?
In boxes on your answer sheet, write
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement disagrees with the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
Deep Blue is the milestone in the competition between humans and machines.
填空题
The difference between humans and computers is that humans can understand complex linguistic structures and using their knowledge to create some others.
填空题
Watson is a better calculator than other modern machines.
填空题
Impulsive behaviour leads to the failure of Watson's rivals.
填空题
Machines' speaking means that they may dominate in people's life some day.
填空题
The highest level of computers is to achieve the same capability of language understanding as humans.
填空题
Super-smart computers will provide people with more accurate and needed information.