I watched the very beginning of a show on the Discovery channel that was talking about artificial intelligence in computers. They talked about software that can learn and hardware that should be able to power it in a few decades. Even though I'm not an expert at AI, I started thinking about how one could truly write a program that could learn, after all, that's the only way a system could really develop good AI right? For some reason, Google Translate popped into my head. Now the interesting thing with this application is that instead of just writing tons of code with all kinds of fancy algorithms, they took a somewhat simpler and even better approach. They instead used a massive bank of documents that were written identically in various languages and did some fancy work there to see how languages relate to one another (link). Brilliant! Then I thought, "well if only they could get a massive data bank of human conversations, they might be able to put together an application capable of passing the Turing Test." But wait! GChat! Everyone's GChat conversations are recorded by default. Think of the millions of different real conversations spanning languages and cultures that Google has access to (sort of, not sure what all their privacy policy would prevent). Could we maybe see a new Google app soon? :P Probably not but I wouldn't put the capability past them.
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