Eureka Man » PARC http://eurekaman.com Pure Gold Mon, 28 Jun 2010 05:38:49 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Is there an uncanny valley for natural language search? http://eurekaman.com/is-there-an-uncanny-valley-for-natural-language-search http://eurekaman.com/is-there-an-uncanny-valley-for-natural-language-search#comments Mon, 09 Apr 2007 03:11:31 +0000 Eureka Man http://eurekaman.com/is-there-an-uncanny-valley-for-natural-language-search There is a hypothesis pertaining to robotics and computer generated, human-like characters called the Uncanny Valley. It states that as robots become more and more human-like, the comfort of humans interacting with them takes a sharp dip before it rises again towards fully human interaction.

Uncanny Valley Graph

In Fernando Pereira’s latest take on Powerset, he eludes to a similar nonmonotonic function for natural language search. Conversing efficiently in natural language requires that you can predict, to some degree of accuracy, what will be understood by your conversation partner. Systems that get uncannily close to human understanding yet fail in cases that are only predictable to the system designers may be frustrating to use. How will the tradeoff between increasing utility and increasing inscrutability pan out? Where is Powerset going to be on this hypothetical graph?

Uncanny Valley

As Fernando says, only testing on the final system will tell.

]]> http://eurekaman.com/is-there-an-uncanny-valley-for-natural-language-search/feed 2 The big secret is out http://eurekaman.com/the-big-secret-is-out http://eurekaman.com/the-big-secret-is-out#comments Sat, 10 Feb 2007 02:26:08 +0000 Eureka Man http://eurekaman.com/the-big-secret-is-out parc as powerset

Looks like we are out to out-Google Google.

]]> http://eurekaman.com/the-big-secret-is-out/feed 2 Spacewar! http://eurekaman.com/spacewar http://eurekaman.com/spacewar#comments Sat, 02 Dec 2006 05:16:07 +0000 Eureka Man http://eurekaman.com/spacewar Spacewar

Tonight was PARC’s Christmas holiday party in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I highly recommend visiting if you’re in the area. This evening they fired up the PDP-1 for us and I kicked ass in Space War. Steve Russell, the original programmer, was there apparently but I didn’t get to play him.

]]> http://eurekaman.com/spacewar/feed 0 PARC Life http://eurekaman.com/parc-life http://eurekaman.com/parc-life#comments Mon, 30 Oct 2006 19:41:14 +0000 Eureka Man http://eurekaman.com/parc-life You walk into one of the hardware labs at PARC. You’re surrounded by scary machines with lasers and pointy bits. There are drawers and drawers of microprocessors, transistors, whatever you desire. Scalpels and screwdrivers in multiple shapes and sizes. There are three guys standing around something in the middle of the lab, pointing and discussing. You walk over and get a peek at what they’re cooking up. It’s a pumpkin. They’re discussing strategy for the inter-lab pumpkin carving contest.

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