a*****g
发帖数: 19398 | 1 人脑赛过电脑的5件事情（zz）
5 things your brain does better than a computer
http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/photos/5-things-yo
Brains are better
For as long as computers have been around, they've been doing things better
than humans. The earliest computing devices were designed to calculate
numbers faster than people, and today's computers can do everything from
calculating pi out to a few billion places to rendering the latest Hollywood
blockbuster onto your screen, complete with Dolby surround sound audio.
Computer-aided design has allowed us to build skyscrapers thousands of feet
high, submarines that can tickle the deepest ocean's deepest depths, and
this. Computers can calculate billions of operations per second and access
huge swaths of information stored in memory. A computer program can defeat a
grand master chess player, Jeopardy champions and top poker players.
But all is not lost. There are still a few activities that are too complex
for a computer to bash its binary way through. In those realms, humans still
reign. But don't get too comfortable; computers are getting faster and
smarter by the year. Here are five things that your brain does better than a
computer. (Text: Shea Gunther)
●Play Go
Go is a board game that was first played in China more than 2,000 years ago.
It is played on a board marked with a 19x19 grid using black-and-white
stones that players use to capture territory. The size of the board (19x19
creates 361 intersections) and the rules of the game (players can place
stones anywhere open on the board on any move, so there's an almost
unimaginable number of scenarios to calculate). In fact, there are more than
10 times more scenarios in Go than there are atoms in the observable
universe. Computers are good at handling big numbers, but that's just
ridiculous. What's more likely is that humans will get better at designing
computer programs that more closely replicate the human brain and its
thought processes. But when that happens and the machines take over, I don't
think we'll be all that concerned about losing a game of Go to a computer.
●Solve crossword puzzles
In the late '90s, New York Times crossword puzzle editor and famed puzzle
master Will Shortz declared that computers would never compete with humans
in solving crossword puzzles. Michael Littman, a computer scientist at Duke
University, picked up Shortz's gauntlet and lead a team in developing
Proverb, a computer program designed to quickly solve crossword puzzles.
Littman's program was entered into the 1999 Annual American Crossword Puzzle
Tournament and rocketed into 147th place.
It hasn't gotten much better for computer program puzzle solvers since then.
Computers solve crossword puzzles by sifting through a database of known
clues and answers and then doing a lot of number crunching to find the
correct arrangement of words. Computers do OK when the clues match something
found in their databanks but they stumble when faced with something out of
the ordinary — Proverb finished near the bottom in a puzzle that involved "
Spoonerisms," clues that required the switching of initial consonant sounds.
For example, "shoot the moon" begets "moot the shoon." It was never
programmed to know how to handle that type of clue and fell flat on its face
when asked to solve them.
●Play Starcraft
Starcraft is a hugely popular real-time strategy video game that pits three
races of combatants against one another in a battle for universal dominance.
Each of the three races — human, Zerg (think alien/bugs from "Starship
Troopers"), and Protoss (psychic humanoids with badass space armor) — have
their own unique abilities that offer a beautifully balanced palette for
wreaking martial chaos. Humans can play in single-player mode and fight to
defeat the built-in computer AI or take to the 'Net to challenge other human
players. Starcraft (and its sequel) are so popular in South Korea that top
players pull in six-figure incomes and are well-known national celebrities.
Starcraft is another one of those games that offers a technical challenge to
computer algorithms because of its complexity. There are nearly 100
different units and buildings that a player can choose and countless
variations of upgrades and options to invest in. Top players combine
lightning fast reflexes (Starcraft technical prowess is measured in Actions
Per Minute or APM, how many things a player can make happen in game in 60
seconds. This video shows one Korean player hitting 300 APM). While a
computer can certainly match and exceed humans in the field of Actions Per
Minute, they don't do as well when it comes to overall strategy. Computer
scientists are making big strides on this front. In 2010, Spain's top player
was defeated by Berkley Overmind, a computer program developed by computer
science students and faculty at UC Berkeley, but computer artificial
intelligence still falls short of being able to beat the top human players
every time.
●Creating art
Wikipedia defines art as "the product or process of deliberately arranging
items (often with symbolic significance) in a way that influences and
affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect." Humans have
been creating art for tens of thousands of years. The earliest object
defined as art dates from around 75,000 years ago. While the earliest
artists carved and painted their works on caves or sea shells, contemporary
artists have a diverse range of mediums to choose from. Some artists use
paints, others work with clay while others do their creating on computers
using programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. (In a recent computer science
class I took, we had to create our own works of art using Java code.)
But that last example wasn't truly created by computers; they merely
facilitated its creation. Humans are still solidly superior to computers
when it involves the actual creation of the work. A computer-generated piece
of art is one that is wholly developed and conceived by artificial
intelligence. Researchers like Ray Kurzweil are doing amazing work with
artificial intelligence that creates art, but it will be a long time, if at
all, before computers are able to produce works with as much emotional and
technical depth as a human.
●Writing
As with the creation of art, this is another arena where humans stand firmly
in the dominating position. For a computer to write a piece of fiction, a
poem, or even a blog post to the same level of quality as a person,
researchers will have to make some big jumps in artificial intelligence. It'
s likely not to happen until we reach the technological singularity, at
which point all the writers we know will be forced to find work as janitors
cleaning up computer server farms. |
|
