Techdirt. Stories filed under "curses" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "curses"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Fri, 11 Jan 2013 09:53:14 PST IBM Researcher Feeds Watson Supercomputer The 'Urban Dictionary'; Very Quickly Regrets It Tim Cushing http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130110/14542221635/ibm-researcher-feeds-watson-supercomputer-urban-dictionary-very-quickly-regrets-it.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130110/14542221635/ibm-researcher-feeds-watson-supercomputer-urban-dictionary-very-quickly-regrets-it.shtml together, culminating in a comfortable retirement in which you live off their immense earnings as a person of brilliance.

Shortly thereafter, you begin to rue the day they ever learned the (now) cursed language of their ancestors.

It starts with the incessant barrage of questions in a meandering quest for knowledge, followed by the barrage of questions (mainly, "Why?") that greet every suggestion, criticism or direct order. Shortly thereafter, it's followed by questions directed at your parenting skills, cultural tastes, archaic slang use, rhetorical devices and sense of direction. At the point where you're wishing their language development had followed Charlie Gordon's "learning curve," you're asked to make a surprise appearance at the school administrator's office to explain a sudden outburst of particularly inventive cursing from your former "pride and joy."

So it is also with artificial life.

Watson, IBM's Jeopardy-contestant supercomputer, showed the world that, with the right programming, any puny human could be bested in a mildly snooty game show that handed out answers and asked for questions. However, the quest for true artificial intelligence is still ongoing.

So, in the interest of science, the whole of human knowledge (Internet Edition™) was dropped into Watson's brain and then... the problems began.
Two years ago, Brown attempted to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary. The popular website contains definitions for terms ranging from Internet abbreviations like OMG, short for "Oh, my God," to slang such as "hot mess."

But Watson couldn't distinguish between polite language and profanity -- which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word "bullshit" in an answer to a researcher's query.
Well, it appears that every teacher's distrust of the internet in general is well-earned. It's nothing but quasi-facts dressed up in four-letter words, like a World Book Encyclopedia annotated by 4chan's /b/ board. (I'm not going to link to it. I won't have your misclicks weighing on my soul.) Still, it's disheartening to know that the use of the word "bullshit" (even correctly) is not considered a sign of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Sure, the word itself may be inappropriate, but under certain circumstances, it is by far the most appropriate answer.

Fortunately for Watson's team, they had the option to remove all this useful knowledge before it offended other researchers who weren't as used to being coldly called on their bullshit.
Ultimately, Brown's 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory. But the trial proves just how thorny it will be to get artificial intelligence to communicate naturally.
It also shows that artificial intelligence has one huge advantage over regular intelligence: the ability to permanently forget. We lowly humans are stuck with a brain that constantly reminds us (especially if we spend much time at places like the aforementioned /b/ board) that what is seen, cannot be unseen.

Watson, having been de-swearified and brainwashed, is now headed to a better place.
Brown is now training Watson as a diagnostic tool for hospitals.
There it will be able to use its acquired knowledge to battle health issues like cancer, AIDS, diabetes and Dissociative Facebook Identity Disorder. 

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]]> hateful-day-when-I-received-life-you-only-live-once-smh-and-etc. http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20130110/14542221635 Wed, 8 Sep 2010 06:12:23 PDT Medieval Copy Protection: I Put A Curse On You Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100820/16502910715.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100820/16502910715.shtml Slashdot points us to this wonderful blog post on the Got Medieval blog about how monks and scribes in the middle ages "copy protected" their books with "book curses" inscribed within the book.

I almost wonder if those were more effective than today's DRM attempts.

The blog has a nice image of one such curse, but here are a couple that I find amusing:
Should anyone by craft of any device whatever abstract this book from this place may his soul suffer, in retribution for what he has done, and may his name be erased from the book of the living and not recorded among the Blessed.
--attributed to a 16th-century French missal belonging to a man named Robert

Thys boke is one
And Godes kors ys anoder;
They take the ton,
God gefe them the toder.

[This book is one (thing),
And God's curse is another;
They that take the one,
God gives them the other.]
--found in various Middle English books.
Perhaps the most clever one though, is described as follows:
But far and away my favorite curse is found in a collection of English court transcripts made by William Easingwold around 1491. It takes the form of a clever Latin code. If you read the top two lines together it says "May he who wrote this book procure the joys of life supernal", but the bottom two together produce "May he who steals this book endure the pangs of death infernal" (Drogin's translation). I don't have an image of the manuscript, but this is a close approximation:
All of this reminds me of an even older story of books and attempts to stop copying, which we wrote about last year, concerning Saint Columba -- also known as Colmcille or Colum Cille -- who in the 6th century, decided to copy some religious books in an attempt to "share" the faith with others. He did so with a Latin translation of the Bible and it created quite the mess, with a debate over the legality of copying a book, and whether or not it counted as "property." You see, these arguments aren't particularly new...

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]]> probably-more-effective http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20100820/16502910715