Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Stanford CSP. Scalable Innovation (BUS 134) Session 2 Quiz 1

Go is a board game invented 2,500 years ago in China. According to a recent MIT Technology Review (MTR) article, "Mastering Go ... requires endless practice, as well as a finely tuned knack of recognizing subtle patterns in the arrangement of the pieces spread across the board."

Experts have long considered Go as one of the most complex and intuitive human games ever created, much more complex than, e.g. chess or poker. Nevertheless, Google AI researchers have developed a software that "beat the European Go champion, Fan Hui, five games to zero. And this March it will take on one of the world’s best players, Lee Sedol, in a tournament to be held in Seoul, South Korea."


Read the MTR article mentioned above and consider/answer the following questions:

1. Does Alpha Go represent a major technology innovation? Explain your reasoning.

2. If combining two or more deep learning networks, as described in the article, is the wave of the future, what industries, new or existing, would benefit from the technology the most? Why?

3. Using the System Model (Scalable Innovation, Part I), hypothesize what system elements and interfaces still need to be invented to complement or take advantage of Alpha Go-like software.

tags: innovation, course, stanford, quiz

1 comment:

Unknown said...

1. I do not think that Alpha Go is at the stage of being classed as a major technology innovation.

When compared to some of histories major technology innovations, such as the mobile telephone, it does not have anything close to the same usage levels (yet).

It should be noted that it is an invention with significant potential. But, it is yet to be used on scale and while it may have endless future applications, those applications are not here today.

2. I can imagine this being applied to any industry that needs to make judgments on the future based on previous trends and patterns, but then again, that is practically every industry. So Let's choose two I would like to see.

A Digital Personal Assistants - It won't be long before we all have our own personal assistant, acting like a 'spontaneous friend' - suggesting new things to try, based on our history. Think of siri, but more empathetic in it's communication with much higher levels of engagement. The programme would have to appear as if it were somewhat curious about you (In a caring empathetic way) in order for it to convince you into the engagement.

Health care - as the video said...but more specifically mental health.

It is interesting to imagine a computer programme that would learn how your thoughts develop and what patterns your mind create that lead to different mind sets. Imagine speaking to a programme that actually remembered exactly why you are feeling the way you are over time, it would be far more effective than any human psychiatrist could ever be. It could potentially rewire people with serious mental health issues if you think about it. A psychiatrist may deem a patient 'too sick for treatment' or 'not worth the effort'. A computer programme does not have those limits. It does not face the problems we do in relation to how much effort we can put in to the problem or how much patience we have with a given task. Even if it took 12months, 24months or 5 years, the programme does not give up. It will only learn more and likely understand the cause more, given that it has the computing power and storage capacity to do so obviously.