Looks like Ray Kurzweil’s predictions are still quite a way off. Garry Kasparov beat Deep Junior in a chess game.
Kasparov made headlines in 1997 when he lost to Deep Blue, a supercomputer built by IBM. Deep Junior, an Israeli-programmed successor, was billed to be able to beat Kasparov, currently the ranking world chess champion, but so far that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Maybe there’s hope for us humans yet.
Well, I was impressed enough talking to a Rogers/AT&T computer Saturday when I was adding minutes to my “Pay As You Go” account on my cell phone. I know the only real difference from before was that the computer recognized my voice saying the numbers and a few keywords (“Add” “Minutes”) instead of the number tones, and I did have to speak like a bad Captain Kirk imitator when saying the numbers, but still, vocal interaction is a big step closer to the sorts of computers they have on Star Trek (the ship computers, I mean, not Data, which is true A.I.).