Learning Ecosystems

Elementary, my dear Watson: Jeopardy computer offers insight into human cognition — from Sentient Developments by George Dvorsky

Also see:

• The DeepQA Project — from IBM; the overarching principles in DeepQA are:

1. Massive parallelism:
   Exploit massive parallelism in the consideration of multiple interpretations and hypotheses.
2. Many experts:
   Facilitate the integration, application and con-textual evaluation of a wide range of loosely coupled probabilistic question and content analytics.
3. Pervasive confidence estimation:
   No single component commits to an answer; all components produce features and associated confidences, scoring different question and contentinterpretations. An underlying confidence processing substratelearns how to stack and combine the scores.
4. Integrate shallow and deep knowledge:
   Balance the use of strict semantics and shallow semantics, leveraging many loosely formed ontologies.

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