COURSTEY MIRROR JUNE 20

IBM pits computer against human debaters
IBM pitted a computer against two human debaters in the first public demonstration of artificial intelligence technology it’s been working on for more than five years.

The company unveiled its Project Debater in San Francisco on Monday, asking it to make a case for government-subsidised space research – a topic it hadn’t studied in advance but championed fiercely with just a few awkward gaps in reasoning.

“Subsidising space exploration is like investing in really good tires,” argued the computer system, its female voice embodied in a 5-foot-tall machine shaped like a monolith with TV screens on its sides.

The computer delivered its opening argument by pulling in evidence from its huge internal repository of newspapers, journals and other sources. It then listened to a professional human debater’s counter-argument and spent four minutes rebutting it.

After closing arguments it moved on to a second debate about telemedicine.

An IBM research team based in Israel began working on Project Debater not long after IBM’s Watson super computer beat two human quizmasters on a ‘Jeopardy’ challenge back in 2011.

As expected, the machine tends to be better than humans at bringing in numbers and other detailed supporting evidence. It’s also able to latch onto the most salient and attention-getting elements of an argument, and can even deliver some self-referential jokes about being a computer.

But it lacks tact, researchers said. Sometimes the jokes don’t come out right. And on Monday, some of the sources it cited – such as a German official and an Arab sheikh – didn’t seem particularly germane.