Word: trivializations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...vote is impersonal, any way you construe it. Its value should not be discounted, but the mob mentality is partly right in that a vote won't do much by itself. The mistake we must avoid is allowing helplessness to spawn from that trivial fact. A vote sits only on the fringe of your rights and privileges as an American. You have the right to vote, but you also have the right to volunteer and accomplish much more than your vote possibly could. A Republican administration might well eliminate HOPE 6. Will that negate the will of the hundreds...
...abject that not even Kasparov can save us. If we must vest the honor of our species in some quintessentially human feat and then defy a machine to perform it, shouldn't it be something the average human can do? Play a mediocre game of Trivial Pursuit, say? (Or lose to Kasparov in chess...
...lesson here--now dogma among researchers in artificial intelligence, or AI--is that the hardest thing for computers is the "simple" stuff. Sure they can play great chess, a game of mechanical rules and finite options. But making small talk--or, indeed, playing Trivial Pursuit--is another matter. So too with recognizing a face or recognizing a joke. As Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology likes to say, the biggest challenge is giving machines common sense. To pass the Turing test, you need some of that...
Besides, judging by the hubbub over the Kasparov match, even if computers could pass the test, debate would still rage over whether they think. No one doubted Deep Blue's chess skills, but many doubted whether it is a thinking machine. It uses "brute force"--zillions of trivial calculations, rather than a few strokes of strategic Big Think. ("You don't invite forklifts to weight-lifting competitions," an organizer of exclusively human chess tournaments said about the idea of man-vs.-machine matches.) On the other hand, there are chess programs that work somewhat like humans. They size...
Dean of Radcliffe Philippa Bovet said the change from "freshman" to "first-year" is not trivial...