February 18, 2006

Artificial Artificial Intelligence

I just learned about Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, which they call "artificial artificial intelligence." Programmers use an MTurk API, which pays people pennies to do "simple tasks that people do better than computers."

HIT stands for Human Intelligence Task. These are tasks that people are willing to pay you to complete. For example a HIT might ask: "Is there a pizza parlour in this photograph?" Typically these tasks are extraordinarily difficult for computers, but simple for humans to answer.
Am I the only person whose first thought was, "This is just dying to be exploited by a sweatshop owner in a third world country"?


Just so you know, the best deal right now appears to be that you can be paid two cents to draw a sheep.

Posted by todd at 2:42 PM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2006

Neuroscience Reading List

A reading course in computational neuroscience at Berkeley has a webpage up with a really handy reading list of neuroscience and AI papers, for the most part complete with links. Of course, a lot of the links will be useless from non-campus networks, but many of the papers are probably available from professors' websites nonetheless.

I, for one, will start with the paper that has the best title: Churchland, Ramachandran, and Sejnowski* A Critique of Pure Vision.

[*] Screw you, UCSD, and your "standards."

Posted by todd at 5:19 PM | Comments (0)

July 6, 2005

Play to Your Strengths

Ed Felten posts that a computer named Hydra has beaten the world's seventh-ranked chess player in six of seven games. That's not really all that interesting to me; computers are just better at that than we are. I did like this bit, however. Probably because I'm a human programmer.

Indeed, algorithmic improvements have been a much bigger factor even than Moore’s Law over the years.

Chess computers have succeeded by ignoring what human chessplayers do best, and doing instead what computers do best. And what computers do best is to run programs written by very clever human programmers.

At least we're still better at that, for now.

Posted by todd at 2:50 PM | Comments (0)