Jeopardy on SSWUG.org
Today’s Jeopardy question pretty clearly demonstrates why it is difficult to create a Computer that can think like the Human Mind.
I was amazed by the number of responses regarding yesterdays SSWUG Jeopardy question…and they were all nearly identical.
What is dropping/mixing a stack of unnumbered programming cards?
In the 60s programmers didn’t have direct access to a computer for programming. They wrote their programs on a device that placed their code in a binary format in the form of holes on a punch card. If the cards were shuffled (a common college prank back then) then the program wouldn’t work…it wouldn’t make sense.
Because cards could become mixed up, later versions had a sequential number for each card. So, even a mixed set of cards could be run through a card sorting machine that would put them back in order to submit as input to the computer.
This is something that older programmers remember vividly through painful events in their life, or stories of pain told by others. The human mind can quickly make the jump from Pain to “The Worst Thing That Can Happen?”
Now, try and put this kind of information into a structured data store. How would you do it in a way that would allow a computer to make the connection of a painful event to the worst thing that can happen? It could be done. Interesting, there is a time factor that is the ultimate clue to resolving the answer, “the 60s”.
Well, this example demonstrates how cool the IBM Watson system is, being able to outperform the Human mind in returning the answer to questions like these. Just ask yourself, how would you sift though large volumes of data, make tangential inferences, and return results in a split second of time.
Every person who wrote in with an answer had “What are mixed punch cards?” Some added additional problems you may enjoy:
- What is an abend?
- What is having a bug (literally!) in the (building sized) computer?
- What is forgetting a period at the end of a COBOL statement?
Enough about Hadoop, big data mining, unstructured data and NoSql for a while. I hope this has been a simple exercise that is easy to grasp for the common programmer, demonstrating why we need to do some things differently.
Feel free to send your thoughts to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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