BCS South West - When Machines Think: A Quantification of Intelligence - November 2012
Channel: BCSSouthWest
Date: 05/03/2013

In 1997 Gary Kasparov was beaten by IBM Deep Blue and the world of chess was outraged. At the time 'sound-bites' included: 'something strange is going on; it didn't play a regular game of chess; it didn't play like a human; it didn't play fair'. Interestingly, no one recognised that a new intelligence had entered the game - a new way of thinking and problem solving devoid of emotion - Artificial Intelligence (AI) that worked! Today that early promise has been eclipsed by IBM Watson which has a general and medical knowledge that completely outguns any human expert. But that is only the beginning...

Industry and commerce now depend upon AI for the control of engines, elevators, logistics, finance, banking, production robotics, and telecom networks. Surprisingly then, we still lack an understanding of what intelligence is, and how to quantify it. Moreover, we have realised that the solution of many industrial, scientific and governmental problems will increasingly defy human abilities, whilst AI will continue to improve and overtake us. And on the creativity front we have seen many of our key electronic inventions overtaken and enhanced by AI, and in some system quarters machine based contributions now outweigh that of humans in large measure.

In this presentation we address the problem of quantifying intelligence and derive intriguing outcomes that challenge conventional wisdom. The audience can expect to be challenged, entertained and provoked as we start from a point of zero knowledge and build a logical framework of thought, deduction, mathematical relationships, and proven facts that have previously been disconnected. All of this is supported by examples, movie clips, pics, animation, graphics.

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