Turing’s Test & The Stock Market
A Non-standard Introduction to Sentiment Analysis in 3 Parts
Part 1 – CAPTCHA to Gotcha:
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence
Alan Turing was a prominent British mathematician and one of the most inspiring pioneers of modern computer science. In 1950, at the age of 38, he published his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which till this day remains probably the single most influential paper in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Since Digital Trowel’s core technology is based on machine learning, a modern offshoot of AI, it would be conducive (and nice!) to get back to the basics, and learn a bit about the history that continues to shape both the science itself and the challenges we face at DT.
Big words and complications aside, Turing begins his paper with the simple yet perplexing question: “Can machines think?” Nevertheless, realizing that “thinking” is a highly ambiguous term, Turing immediately proposed an alternative question that would be free of obscurities and eschew obfuscations. Instead of dealing with machines’ capacity for thinking, he focused on their capacity to emulate human thought. In simplified terms the question he suggested was:
Could machines be made to simulate human thought well enough so as to fool a person into believing they were actually human?
This question is the essence of what has come to be called the Turing Test. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine’s intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen.
At the time of its publication, many people viewed the prospect of machines ever reaching the level of human computational power an impossibility, but in his paper, Turing, armed with his visionary intuition and razor-sharp mathematical analysis, set out to invalidate contemporary objections, ending with a speculation of his own, that one day machines would indeed emulate human thought, thereby passing the Turing Test!
Inspired by the challenge, Digital Trowel’s groundbreaking technology has taken several huge steps forward in proving that Turing was right. The technology we’ve developed allows computers to extract not only the facts communicated by the text, but also the underlying sentiment or, if you will, the attitude associated with the message conveyed. In simple words, we’re enabling computers to understand the full meaning not only of the text, but of the subtext – just as a human would. But hold your horses! Before we continue, let’s try to explain why the problem is so difficult, so we can more fully appreciate the profundity of Digital Trowel’s achievement and its extraordinary implications.
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