Powerset, which is developing a natural-language search engine to rival Google, will finally launch its service in September after more than a year in the labs, according to the company's Web site. Powerset CEO Barney Pell will demonstrate the technology, called Powerlabs, next week while speaking at the Singularity Summit, a two-day conference on artificial intelligence and the "future of humanity" in San Francisco, according to the newsletter KurzweilAI.net.
Unlike search giant Google, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Powerset is using techniques in AI to train computers not just to read words on the page, but to make connections between those words, or make inferences in the language. That way, the search engine could think through and redefine relevance beyond the most popular page or the site with the most occurrences of keywords entered in a search box (which is the way Google works).
Beyond demonstrating Powerlabs, Pell plans to talk about challenges to AI. He asks in his blog: "How many man-hours have actually been applied to the task of creating human-level AI? The number is likely a tiny fraction of the research in AI fields to date," Pell wrote. "So with advanced computing and communications technology amplifying research and with a focused effort on the core problems, progress might come about faster than anyone thinks."
Other speakers at the two-day conference will include Google's Director of Research Peter Norvig and MIT AI Lab Director Rodney Brooks.
A group of computer scientists from Canada said Thursday that they've managed to crack the "code" of the checkers board game so that a computer program can win or draw against any opponent, according to a story from the BBC.
Even though a computer program by the name of Chinook won the World's Checkers Championship in 1994, that software would lose the game occasionally.
The Canadian team, which was led by Jonathan Schaeffer, chair of the department of computer science at the University of Alberta, said that checkers has been the most challenging game to beat because there are as many as 500 billion potential moves in the board game. According to an article published in the journal Science, it took an average of 50 computers almost 20 years to find the right solution to best a human competitor at every turn.
Next up for the team: chess. But that means taking on IBM's Deep Blue.
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