News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What ... by sdrinf on Saturday September 25, 2010 @05:34PM (#1727928)
Innocent-looking question from an ex-AI researcher:

Take a moment, and disregard your technological know-how (the fact that you think you know how it works), and consider Google strictly as a black-box.

Which functionalities of a strong AI have they not delivered (or are not well within the way to be delivering) so far?

Re:Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What ... by sendos on Saturday September 25, 2010 @05:46PM (#1727946)
If we go by the following definition of Strong AI (from Wikipedia)

Strong AI is artificial intelligence that matches or exceeds human intelligence — the intelligence of a machine that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a human being can

then there are lots of things that Google can't do that many human beings can. For example, when you do an image search, the results are sometimes laughable, and that's because Google doesn't understand image content and just reports results based on the tags on the image or based on surrounding text. Lots of human beings would have understood the search query well enough to not return the results Google returned in many cases. So, Strong AI it ain't

Re:Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What ... by farmerbuzz on Monday September 27, 2010 @10:50AM (#1731845)
Not to mention speech to text on Google Voice (usually laughable results) and translation (works a bit better, but breaks down hilariously e.g. http://groups.google.com/group/shibboleth-users/browse_threa... ).
Re:Ask HN: After almost 30 years the romance is over - What ... by _delirium on Monday September 27, 2010 @12:50AM (#1730775)
Anything with a bit of judgment call about the kind of site you want returned is really bad, imo. Say I asked someone to search for blackberry-pie recipes, but specified I only wanted recipes from individuals, e.g. stuff posted on personal/university/etc. websites, not on content farms, TV cooking shows' websites, aggregators, etc. A human could trawl through a few dozen pages of results and pull out some recipes, but afaik there's no search term on Google that will do that.

It's also bad at summarizing information. I can get a scattered set of results for lots of topics, but it can't synthesize those results into a nice executive-summary paragraph for me. Never mind even better summarization, like searching for a topic that has no Wikipedia article yet, and having Google's algorithms write the article for me to read!