Why we aren’t there yet.
September 11th, 2007 | by Mike Corey |
I’m in a surprisingly pessimistic mood today regarding AI. I was thinking about search engines. We rely on them daily. They take the vast content of the web and shrink it down into some ranked subset of relevancy to a query. There’s just an arbitrary algorithm thrown in the middle to rank results. Thats fine. I just want a lead as to where the results are.
This is where certain search engines cross the line. Search engines like Ask! and Answers.com try to confuse the user by allowing them to ask questions. A user is lead to believe that they are talking to a computer that will give them the answer. In reality these sites simply parse out relevant terms using a large grammar and can’t actually reason at all.
Enter Hakia. A search engine billed as a semantic search engine. Could this possibly have an ability to reason? Of course not. Asking Hakia a question normally yields the same search results without common sense or logical sentence evaluation. Its closer as it seems to do a bit of taxonomic searching and wordnet parsing but at the end of the day, it filters and doesn’t reason.
Of course Just for the fun of it I asked that ugly Alice a question.
Human: what color is a blue car?
ALICE: Red.
Human: really?
ALICE: For real.
So in short, we aren’t there yet.
One Response to “Why we aren’t there yet.”
By Warren on Sep 13, 2007 | Reply
I have a very poor opinion of Ask! in particular. Why can’t it just roll over already and save us all a hideous eyesore? I hate it and would speak in harsh tones to anyone responsible for its continued existence.