/inˈkrejələns/ – Noun – The ability to Acquire and Apply the Knowledge and Skills Necessary to Develop Crippling Cynicism
Have you read the news lately? AlphaGo, Google’s latest auto-quixotic flagellation robot, beat some dude at Go, a game which is kinda like if Chinese Checkers and Risk had a big fat baby. For a trip down memory lane, here is a list of times people were forced to build computer programs to play against game champs because no one else was willing.
- In 1770, the Mechanical Turk, or Deep Bull if you want to keep with the recent naming structure, challenged and beat several people, such as Napolean and Benjamin Franklin, in games of chess. The Turk was revealed as a hoax because capitalizing on peoples rube-like fascination with complex magic tricks didn’t become a fad until the Dot Com Boom of the 90’s.
- In 1997, Deep Blue, named for the color of the face of the guy who foots IBM’s technology bill, beat Garry Kasparov at Chess. Much like those who witnessed the Mechanical Turk centuries earlier, Kasparov was spotted letting out a “pious ejaculation” and hiding in the back corner.
- Flash forward to 2011 when IBM spent most of its staffs pension on a robot that could Google stuff for you. They entered their prize metal ass into a game of Jeopardy and thrashed Ken Jennings, who later went on to spur one of the weirdest Huffington Post articles I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately by the time they looked up from their cubicles, Let Me Google That For You had been invented 2 years earlier and could also answer Jeopardy questions.
- Finally we arrive to this year. Google, wanting to leave no obsolescent stone unturned, spent a good chunk of change building a machine that could understand Go. From what I can tell, Go matches resemble several confused guys in an alley next to a fruit stand and a burning milk crate. AlphaGo won its matches by upending the sad crate and going the hell home.
Popular Science has an article that sorta kinda says that we’re just digitizing the Mechanical Turk. Have we really changed all that much from the days where we’d build wooden box, put a smarty pants inside, and wow and amuse a crowd while our associates nab their wallets?
I declare that the first computer to win at True American will have my undieing fealty until the day I die. Then, and only then, can a machine be considered artificially intelligent.
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