Von Ahn, who grew up in Guatemala City, believes that A.I. will eventually make computers better teachers than humans.
In the fall of 2000, as the first dotcom bubble was bursting, the Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn attended a talk, at Carnegie Mellon, about ten problems that Yahoo couldn’t solve. Von Ahn, who had just begun his Ph.D., liked solving problems. He had planned to study math until he realized that many mathematicians were still toiling away over questions that had proved unanswerable for centuries. “I talked to some computer-science professors and they would say, ‘Oh, yeah, I solved an open problem last week,’” he told me recently. “That seemed just a lot more interesting.”
At the talk, one particular problem caught his attention: millions of bots were registering for Yahoo accounts because the company couldn’t distinguish them from human beings. What the company needed was a rudimentary variation on the Turing Test, which the English mathematician Alan Turing had proposed, in 1950, as a way of determining whether machines could credibly imitate human beings. In the most familiar version of the test, a person poses questions to two figures he cannot see: one human, one machine. The machine passes the test if the evaluator can’t reliably decide which is which. Back in 2000, no computer had ever succeeded.
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Denne historien er fra April 24 - May 01, 2023 (Double Issue)-utgaven av The New Yorker.
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BADDIE ISSUES
\"Wicked\" and \"Gladiator II.\"
LET'S MAKE A DEAL
\"Death Becomes Her\" and \"Burnout Paradise.\"
ANTI HEROES
\"The Franchise,\" on HBO.
FELLOW-TRAVELLERS
The surprisingly sunny origins of the Frankfurt School.
NOW YOU SEE ME
John Singer Sargent's strange, slippery portraits of an art dealer's family.
PARIS FRIEND - SHUANG XUETAO
Xiaoguo had a terror of thirst, so he kept a glass of water on the table beside his hospital bed. As soon as it was empty, he asked me to refill it. I wanted to warn him that this was unhealthy - guzzling water all night long puts pressure on the kidneys, and pissing that much couldn't be good for his injury. He was tall, though, so I decided his insides could probably cope.
WILD SIDE
Is Lake Tahoe's bear boom getting out of hand?
GETTING A GRIP
Robots learn to use their hands.
WITHHOLDING SEX FROM MY WIFE
In the wake of [the] election, progressive women, who are outraged over Donald Trump's victory at the ballot box, have taken to social media with public, vengeful vows of chastity. - The Free Press.
DEADLINE EXTENSION
Old age, reborn.