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Assignment 5Due: Friday, February 6, in class
Writing/Discussion topic: Computers and Natural Language--ELIZA Computers can perform a variety of tasks for people, but so far computers only do what they are told to do by means of computer programs. A great deal of research has been done on creating artificial intelligence, i.e. machines that can think for themselves. One aspect of this research is trying to program computers to understand natural language, i.e. language as it is spoken by people. (You have already seen how limited the understanding of computers is when it comes to writing programs in Python!) In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a program, called ELIZA, that communicated with people as if it were a psychotherapist. It did this by recognizing key words in the user's comments and echoing these words back to them in a set stock of phrases that might be used by a therapist. The result was convincing enough that some people insisted on communicating with ELIZA only in private and said that they felt the machine "understood them." Read the following article: Weizenbaum, J. (1967) Contextual Understanding by Computers, Communications of the ACM, 10: 474 - 480. Play with the ELIZA program. To be realistic, you should pretend that you are talking with a psychoanalyst. Answer the following questions. Write at least 1/2 page, typed and double spaced, for each question. a) Give a reasoned argument that supports the contention that computers will soon be able to understand and converse with humans (i.e. have true artificial intelligence). b) Give a reasoned argument that computers will never have intelligence comparable to that of humans. (Note: You will likely agree more with one of the above two arguments, but I want you to try to understand both points of view).
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Constance Royden--croyden@mathcs.holycross.edu
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