Man 1, machine 1: landmark debate between AI and humans ends in draw

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: June 19, 2018 at 13:41:01 GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Man 1, machine 1: landmark debate between AI and humans ends in draw
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Man 1, machine 1: landmark debate between AI and humans ends in draw
> IBM shows off Project Debater, artificial intelligence project designed to make coherent arguments as it processes 
> vast data sets
> By Olivia Solon
> Jun 18 2018
> <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/18/artificial-intelligence-ibm-debate-project-debater>
>
> It was man 1, machine 1 in the first live, public debate between an artificial intelligence system developed by IBM 
> and two human debaters.
>
> The AI, called Project Debater, appeared on stage in a packed conference room at IBM’s San Francisco office embodied 
> in a 6ft tall black panel with a blue, animated “mouth”. It was a looming presence alongside the human debaters Noa 
> Ovadia and Dan Zafrir, who stood behind a podium nearby.
>
> Although the machine stumbled at many points, the unprecedented event offered a glimpse into how computers are 
> learning to grapple with the messy, unstructured world of human decision-making.
>
> For each of the two short debates, participants had to prepare a four-minute opening statement, followed by a 
> four-minute rebuttal and a two-minute summary. The opening debate topic was “we should subsidize space exploration”, 
> followed by “we should increase the use of telemedicine”.
>
> In both debates, the audience voted Project Debater to be worse at delivery but better in terms of the amount of 
> information it conveyed. And in spite of several robotic slip-ups, the audience voted the AI to be more persuasive 
> (in terms of changing the audience’s position) than its human opponent, Zafrir, in the second debate.
>
> It’s worth noting, however, that there were many members of IBM staff in the room and they may have been rooting for 
> their creation. 
>
> IBM hopes the research will eventually enable a more sophisticated virtual assistant that can absorb massive and 
> diverse sets of information to help build persuasive arguments and make well-informed decisions – as opposed to 
> merely responding to simple questions and commands. 
>
> Project Debater was a showcase of IBM’s ability to process very large data sets, including millions of news articles 
> across dozens of subjects, and then turn snippets of arguments into full flowing prose – a challenging task for a 
> computer. 
>
> The machine spoke with a confident female voice with a natural cadence, segues and organisational structure to its 
> speech, but it lacked linguistic precision and argumentative clarity. 
>
> During the space debate, for example, it repeated the point that space exploration is beneficial to the economy 
> several times using slightly different words. There were also times when the second clause of a sentence didn’t 
> smoothly follow the first clause. At other times, the AI system injected random anecdotes and quotes in a way that 
> didn’t feel entirely natural.
>
> At one point, mid-sentence, the AI mentioned the astronaut Scott Kelley and then said “voiceover”, indicating that 
> portion of the argument had been taken from a video transcript. 
>
> Without hand gestures (well, without hands altogether) or facial expressions, it was also much harder for audience 
> members to stay engaged when listening to the robo-debater.
>
> The company has spent six years developing Project Debater’s capabilities, including data-driven speech writing and 
> delivery, listening comprehension for identifying key claims made within a speech, and the ability to formulate 
> principled arguments. It expands upon the capabilities of IBM’s supercomputer Watson, which is being used by 
> companies to mine huge internal data sets – including helping doctors diagnose different types of cancer.
>
> The landmark event follows similar battles between man and machine, including IBM’s Deep Blue program beating Gary 
> Kasparov at chess, Google’s AI program AlphaGo beating the world’s best players at the strategy board game Go and a 
> program called Libratus beating four of the world’s top poker players at no-limit Texas Hold ’Em. 
>
> Using language and reasoning to debate is a far more complicated game. 
>
> “The rules of chess are very few. The board is very small and the number of pieces is tiny. Even for Go, where the 
> board is substantially larger, we’re still talking about an extremely bounded and well defined space,” said Chris 
> Reed, a professor at the Centre for Argument Technology at the University of Dundee, who attended the 
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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