Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
It's not like this is the kind of thing computers try every day.
It's a technological achievement, yeah, but just because they showed it off in a somewhat obfuscated and flashy way doesn't somehow make it historical.
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I have seen this kind of sentiment from a lot of people. Almost none of them with backgrounds in Computer Science/engineering.
Parsing and interpreting natural language is extremely difficult. You need to understand that the fact that the computer can quickly pull up answers is not the impressive part. The impressive part is the fact that it could figure out what needed to be answered. Putting all of the worlds knowledge into a computer is trivial, telling the computer how to provide the relavent info is the interesting task.
How many times have you wanted to google something and when you actually sat down to do it you didn't know what to type? It takes humans significant time to parse a question and decide what are the key words. Try typing a question into a search engine exactly the way you would ast an expert on the topic, odds are you wont get what you want. Ask watson and your odds are much better.
However David, this is still a long way from passing a Turing test. Parsing natural language is one thing, constructing it is an even more difficult problem.