We are looking at methods for automating the web, enabling applications to use the data existing in websites as well as the data being useful to people. One new thing I learnt was that the Opera web browser has text and voice recognition built in. This means that if you can't be bothered to read a passage of text then it can be read off by Opera and in turn transfered to your mp3 player for later review.
Eliza & Turing
Eliza was designed in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum and was an early stab at artificial intelligence. It worked using a a form of psychology named after Carl Rogers who, in the 1940s and 1950s developed a way of communicating with his patients by developing a relationship with them and trying to empathize with their situations. The graphic on the left is a sample of his work in action. Of course, this is a very rudimentary form of intelligence and is easy to spot when the person at the other end is not a human being. In 1950 Alan Turning produced a paper called "Computing machinery and intelligence," in it he defines the test as "a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which try to appear human; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test." As machines get faster and capable of more complicated processing then it is hoped that soon we will get intelligent machines. However, in the 1970s IBM claimed that they would have speech recognition cracked very soon and yet in 2007, when talking to another graduate we spoke about his placement work at Intel that year working on exactly the same thing! It is obviously not that easy.
