Posted by: vinothifes on: January 25, 2012
Last February, the IBM supercomputer Watson won an exhibition game of the American TV show “Jeopardy” against two of its best contestants. This was a significant advance on Deep Blue, another IBM supercomputer, which had defeated the six-time world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. It was hailed in the popular media as heralding the [...]
Posted by: vinothifes on: January 10, 2012
The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was notorious among his contemporaries for his cynical view of human nature. Hobbes held that we always act out of self-interest. Once a friend observed him giving money to a beggar and asked Hobbes if what he had just done did not disprove his own theory of human motivation. [...]
