When your enemy has no arms or legs?
Ah, yes. Situations where your enemy has no arms or legs but you still have to kill him with a huge sword are very common in combat. I can see why people would make swords specifically for these occasions.
Won't be long before Watson and his buddies make us wish we had focused more on huge sword production.
Sorry just wanted an excuse to use that image
Anyway if you think about what a CPU is, it's essentially a giant serial processor. It tackles one task at a time. The incredible thing about the brain is that it's an incredibly efficient parallel processor. There is no "core" or set of "cores". It's billions and billions of neurons (for all intents and purposes: NOMFET memristors) that connect are arranged in a dynamic architecture. Some parts of the brain are designated tasks but if you were to damage your auditory cortex the brain would designate that task to another part. The best part is that the cortexes (? corteces??) share information. So if your brain is doing a task of processing music you might have your auditory cortex taking apart that stream of information while sending it to the cerebellum that remembers parts of it which sends that to the auditory cortext to make corrections and this happens hundreds of times a second across many cortexes every waking second of the day. CPUs are simply too serial in nature to mimic this today. The world's best parallel processors are huge and in turn run into logistical issues of latency and software/hardware design.
It's incredible, but it's not unsolvable. That's why I praise IBM for this publicity stunt. Yeah it's exaggerated, sure it's not real intelligence, but it's a leap forward that wouldn't have been there if they hadn't invested into this. Watson develops basic patterns. Not high level patterns, not with 100% accuracy, but it's a start. You mimic one part of human intelligence then expand on it. It might seem crazy but looking on the past 50 years of logic design and IC advancement I'd say we might be seeing REAL AI by 2061.
