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Paul Grobstein's picture

Can a computer play Jeopardy as well as a human?

Apropos of our current and anticipated conversations, see What is IBM's Watson?

Yes, a universal Turing machine may in fact play Jeopardy at least as well as  a human.  Assuming so, playing Jeopardy well is within the Gödel limit of a universal Turing machine running a deterministic algorithm, and will have been shown to be so in a case of currently available (if somewhat unusual) memory capacity and processor speed. 

Perhaps a point on the side of the brain as a universal Turing machine, but there's lots of race yet to be run. Moreover its worth noting that the algorithm in this case has some  characteristics that would have surprised programmers working in Turing's era as well as up to no more than fifteen or twenty years ago.  And those characteristics may prove to be ways to simulate on a universal Turing machine information processing strategies that are implemented differently and more straightforwardly in a human brain.

"no single algorithm can simulate the human ability to parse language and facts. Instead, Watson uses more than a hundred algorithms at the same time to analyze a question in different ways, generating hundreds of possible solutions. Another set of algorithms ranks these answers according to plausibility; for example, if dozens of algorithms working in different directions all arrive at the same answer, it’s more likely to be the right one. In essence, Watson thinks in probabilities. It produces not one single “right” answer, but an enormous number of possibilities, then ranks them by assessing how likely each one is to answer the question."

A universal Turing machine can't actually "use more than a hundred algorithms" at the same time, but a single properly written algorithm can give the appearance of doing so and, within limits, produce results comparable to a system, like the brain, that actually does use several different algorithms simultaneously.  Similarly, a universal Turing machine can't actually "think in probabilities" but a properly written deterministic algorithm can give the appearance of doing so and, within limits, produce results comparable to a system, of which the brain may well be one, in which the basic currency of information processing is not deterministic 1's and 0's but instead probabilities. 

So, the issue of whether the brain is a univeral Turing machine, and constrained by the limits of such a machine, remains open.  Yep, human performance at Jeapordy may well prove to be within the computational limits of a universal Turing machine.  But it may well be that establishing this will turn out to be more significant in clarifying the differences between a brain and a univeral Turing machine than it is in establishing an equivilence between the two. 

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