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Powerset.comJuly 26, 2008
A website that came to my attention a couple of months ago is
www.powerset.com. This search engine has tried to make advances like I've just described. For example, when I search for "What year did World War II end?", it comes back with:
World War II: End date
September 2, 1945 (62 years ago)Not bad. That's definitely an advance. What makes this especially impressive is that the search engine didn't suggest an article, but gave me the answer to my question directly as a value.
While this search engine is impressive, their implementation isn't very exhaustive. Other simple questions such as "How many feet are there in a yard?" don't return a specific value. As search engines continue to advance in the coming years, more and more of these questions will result in specific answers, and to push the boundaries, these search engines will need better language parsing and better internal representations of the world.
Here's a list of queries that Powerset was able to answer:
  | Ok: Bill Clinton's birthday |
| Fails: What is Bill Clinton's birthday? |
| Ok: What year was Bill Clinton born? |
| Ok: Bill Clinton's daughter |
| Ok: Who is Bill Clinton's daughter? |
| Fails: What is the name of Bill Clinton's daughter? |
| Ok: Who is Bill Clinton's wife? |
| Fails: Who was the first president of the United States? |
| Fails: First president of the United States |
| Fails: What year did man first go to the moon? |
| Ok: What is the capital city of Florida? |
| Ok: What is the capital city of Belgium? |
| Partial: Who invented the telephone? |
| Ok: What is the population of Mexico? |
| Fails: How many states are there in the United States? |
AI and search enginesJuly 26, 2008
One of the most sensible uses of an AI that can read information, update a data structure to reflect that information, and then answer questions about that information, is a search engine. In fact, that's exactly what a search engine is, the difference being that today the internal representation that search engines use doesn't contain much meaning.
What this brings to mind is that the Internet is an important aspect of AI: It serves as the raw knowledge base for an AI to read to learn about the world. Now, this has some serious limitations given that anyone can write whatever they want on the 'Net, but overall I think the Internet will serve as one of the primary means for AI's learning about the world.
Let's fast forward into the future and ask Google some questions that will test its understanding of the world:
Search: What is Bill Clinton's birthday?
Answer: August 19, 1946
Search: What year did World War II end?
Answer: 1945
Search: What month comes after November?
Answer: December
Search: How many feet are there in a yard?
Answer: 3
Search: What day of the week was it when man first landed on the moon?
Answer: ...
Added to list: 100 mile diet for 100 daysJuly 23, 2008
Last night Meredith and I had our small group over for a potluck meal, and as we considered what to do for our time together in the fall, someone had a great idea: Attempt the
100 mile diet for 100 days. Wow.
We decided to start on Feb. 15 2009 to give ourselves time to read the book and plan, and that would make the end date the annual Mennonite Relief Sale. We have all sorts of other ideas in terms of fund raising for the church's building fund by hosting a 100 mile dinner, etc., as well as fund raising for the relief sale.
It's all a little scary at this point, but I'm excited. It should be lots of fun and an amazing learning opportunity!
I think this might be my first "group" thing in my list of 99 things. I'm looking forward to it.
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