Communications of the ACM
IBM Pits Computer Against Human Debaters
IBM Senior Technical Staff Member Noam Slonim stands with the IBM Project Debater system.
Credit: The Star
IBM pitted a computer against two human debaters in the first public demonstration of artificial intelligence technology it's been working on for more than five years.
The company unveiled its Project Debater in San Francisco, asking it to make a case for government-subsidized space research—a topic it hadn't studied in advance but championed fiercely with just a few awkward gaps in reasoning.
"Subsidizing space exploration is like investing in really good tires," argued the computer system, its female voice embodied in a 5-foot-tall machine shaped like a monolith with TV screens on its sides. Such research would be a "very sound investment," it said.
The computer delivered its opening argument by pulling in evidence from its huge internal repository of newspapers, journals, and other sources. It then listened to a professional human debater's counter-argument and spent four minutes rebutting it.
IBM's latest project taps into several more complex branches of AI. As expected, the machine tends to be better than humans at bringing in numbers and other detailed supporting evidence. It's also able to latch onto the most salient and attention-getting elements of an argument, and can even deliver some self-referential jokes about being a computer.
From The Times of India
View Full Article
No entries found