My word processor can tell me if I’ve misspelled a word. Computers handle language as data all the time – and do it quite well. But although my copy of Microsoft Word can recognize and highlight something like “Schwarzeneger” with a red squiggly line, it doesn’t understand the meaning of that word or what it signifies – and it certainly won’t comprehend complete sentences, instructions, or any memorable one-liners about how “it’s not a tumor.”
But recent research at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab has demonstrated that computers can analyze words, derive meaning from those words, and follow a set of instructions to perform a task. In this case, a special machine-learning system was able to achieve a 79 percent rate of victory in Civilization II against the game’s AI opponents using instructions from the manual…
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