• Question: is there such thing as a super computer that knows everything that we know?

    Asked by greywolf01 to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 12 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by dawnofwarfan.
    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      As far as I know, not yet!

      The internet is about the closest you will come to finding out everything that people know, although you have to dig through a lot of rubbish and pictures of Justin Bieber before you get there! But there is a lot of science that was done before the internet was invented, that is still in some dusty library waiting to be read.

      Supercomputers are really good and knowing things that we don’t know. Being a supercomputer means that have lots of power crammed into them, so they are good at working things out quickly (rather than storing information). So supercomputers are used to give us quick answers to complicated maths problems that would take a person years and years to figure out.

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      Computers ‘know’ more than us already, probably. The problem is that computers often don’t know what to do with their knowledge. Most of the time they need a human to tell them how to interpret information. As soon as computers learn how to do this on their own, we’re in trouble…

    • Photo: Nazim Bharmal

      Nazim Bharmal answered on 10 Mar 2012:

      The “cleverest” computer we have made that knows a lot of stuff is called “Watson” and was made by IBM in America. It is huge, but it is also good enough to play on an American quiz show called ‘Jeopardy’. (Its not like any UK TV.)

      Basically, the quiz works by giving you the answer and you have to say what the question is, which is always like “What is XXX?”. And last year, the computer played against the human champion and won!

      If you asked Watson a different type of question, like “is there such thing as a super computer that knows everything that we know?”, it would just get “confused”.

      So it “knows” a lot, but only a tiny amount compared to what we know.

      In the end, together computers and humans make a great team because we control them. But when computers get so advanced that we easily can’t understand them, then maybe we’ll have to start saying “please” and “thank you”.

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      Computers only really know what we tell them. They’re much faster than us at calculating stuff, but they can’t think for themselves.

      I work a lot with citizen scientists (in Galaxy Zoo) and there we’ve found tasks which humans are much better at than computers (visual identification in that case) so we ask people to help us via the internet.

    • Photo: Catherine Rix

      Catherine Rix answered on 12 Mar 2012:

      I hope not – that sounds pretty scary, have you seen Terminator?

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