Then
and
NOW
MAN VS. MACHINE
by Tom Carroll
Man vs. machine ... which is better? Talk about a loaded question! I’m not
talking about the popular series of arcade and smart phone games. I’m referring
to on-going debate concerning the ability of a machine to emulate or surpass a
human in many (or all) capabilities.
Fifteen years ago, IBM built a computer named Deep Blue (shown in Figure 1) and challenged chess Grandmaster
Gary Kasparov to a series of chess games (Figure 2). Deep
Blue won the first match but Kasparov returned to win
three and draw two of the games, soundly defeating the
computer. The next year, Deep Blue ‘returned’ and beat the
Russian six games to zero. A decade and a half later in
2011, IBM was ready with another challenger and a
different type of match —- the TV quiz show, Jeopardy.
Jeopardy is quite different than a game of chess as it
requires a very wide base of knowledge. As most of you know,
in Jeopardy the answers are given to the contestants — most
of the time in the form of puns or other word games. The new
IBM computer was programmed to understand the complexity
of word play in the human language and respond accordingly
with a question. IBM’s
super-computer Watson
(depicted as the center
contestant in Figure 3)
managed to best Ken
Jennings and Brad
Rutter — two of the
winningest players of
FIGURE 1. IBM's Deep Blue.
the TV game show. The appearance on the show was more
than just a stunt; it displayed a specific capability of a
computer to find the best answer for a certain question, or
in this case, the best question for an answer. Did this
experiment prove that a machine was better than a human?
Much the same as the Deep Blue competition, the
actual computer was not what was on stage but was in a
large server facility miles away. It drew 175 KW of power
and filled the AC-cooled server room versus a measly 150
watts for each of the two human beings, with individual
brains using only 10 watts each. Some might say that
Watson did indeed beat the humans, but others have said
that humans are still the better question answerers despite
the loss. Maybe when Moore’s Law progresses a bit (lot)
more and compresses the required transistor mass down to
a few kilograms drawing a few watts, then we’ll have a
true competitor for a human’s intelligence.
New IBM Computer Core Chip
Closer to Human Brain
Speaking of lower power and a better way to process
information, this past August IBM made an announcement
about a neurosynaptic chip or — as they
call them — neural cores. Working with
funding from DARPA and in conjunction
with four US universities, the IBM chips
work very much like the human brain. The
neurons and synapses of the brain are
interconnected with each other and just as
our brains learn, these interconnections
are always changing. This is different
from standard computer chips where
information is processed systematically on
non-changing circuitry, one piece of data
FIGURE 2. Kasparov vs. Deep Blue.
76 SERVO 11.2011
