New Watson-Style AI Called Viv Seeks To Be the First 'Global Brain' 161
paysonwelch sends this report from Wired on the next generation of consumer AI:
Google Now has a huge knowledge graph—you can ask questions like "Where was Abraham Lincoln born?" And it can name the city. You can also say, "What is the population?" of a city and it’ll bring up a chart and answer. But you cannot say, "What is the population of the city where Abraham Lincoln was born?" The system may have the data for both these components, but it has no ability to put them together, either to answer a query or to make a smart suggestion. Like Siri, it can’t do anything that coders haven’t explicitly programmed it to do. Viv breaks through those constraints by generating its own code on the fly, no programmers required. Take a complicated command like "Give me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq could fit in." Viv will parse the sentence and then it will perform its best trick: automatically generating a quick, efficient program to link third-party sources of information together—say, Kayak, SeatGuru, and the NBA media guide—so it can identify available flights with lots of legroom.
How much? (Score:5, Funny)
Ask it "In the case where a woodchuck possessed the ability to throw wood, how much wood, hypothetically, could be thrown?"
Re:How much? (Score:3, Funny)
Ask it "In the case where a woodchuck possessed the ability to throw wood, how much wood, hypothetically, could be thrown?"
The answer would depend on how much the woodchuck enjoyed chucking wood. If the woodchuck enjoys chucking wood, then the woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood. If the woodchuck does not enjoy chucking wood, then the woodchuck would not chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood. So the amount of wood is somewhere inbetween zero and the maximum amount of wood a woodchuck could chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
Re:How much? (Score:5, Funny)