Cognitive Tech is the R&D Game-Changer

2016 may be the year where Artificial Intelligence (AI) leaps firmly from science fiction into the present. Recently, Google’s DeepMind AlphaGo program scored a landmark victory for AI, beating the world champion Lee Se-dol at Go, a game so fiendishly complex that the best players rest on attuned intuition to make decisions. Since Alan Turing famously defined the tests for AI in terms of capacities that mimic human intelligence, it was inevitable that progress would be showcased by human-machine duels. But while landmark moments make for great public spectacle, like IBM Deep Blue beating grandmaster Kasparov at chess or the successor IBM Watson winning the popular game show Jeopardy, this performance obscured the real remarkable story. In the build up to the event, Se-dol had been himself coaching AlphaGo to improve its play; although Se-dol is a prodigious Go player, he is not a computer scientist. Yet he was able to interact with the computer, and the computer was able to learn then generate new learnings. This development is a key characteristic of a new form of computing that many are calling cognitive tech. The traditional programs that most of us are used to were designed with completely different principles in mind, to execute a pre-defined recipe of actions incredibly quickly. While they were effective at this, they were very limited in their ability to discover new knowledge. But now, due to advances in both statistical techniques for working with big data and inf...
Source: EyeForPharma - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news