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Digital Consciousness

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The Universal Machine

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Abstract

It’s February 16 2011 and you’re sitting amongst the studio audience for the popular TV game show Jeopardy. Two of the show’s previous champions are on stage: Ken Jennings, who had a 74 game winning streak that earned him over $2.5 million and Brad Rutter, the all time Jeopardy money winner whose sharp mind earned him a staggering $3 million! In between them the third competitor isn’t human; it’s a computer called Watson. Where a person should be standing is a black screen with a globe shaped avatar on it that changes color as Watson thinks – green when it thinks its correct, red when it’s unsure.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    To be fair to Watson there are also Toronto’s in: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio and South Dakota. The town of Tamo, Arkansas is also known as Toronto. Sometime it’s wiser not to know too much.

  2. 2.

    http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html

  3. 3.

    Watch video of the noodle robots http://youtu.be/5sVOSlUn7e0

  4. 4.

    Watch video of BigDog here: www.YouTube.com/BostonDynamics

  5. 5.

    A Zephyr British drone has flown for over 82 hours nonstop.

  6. 6.

    Drone Wars UK is a blog that monitors the use of drones by the British and worldwide: http://dronewarsuk.wordpress.com/

  7. 7.

    If you’re not squeamish you can watch an RFID chip being inserted into a volunteers hand on YouTube http://youtu.be/HQ9-_soOToc

  8. 8.

    No actual cats were harmed in this physics experiment.

  9. 9.

    http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/

  10. 10.

    http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/business_analytics/article/cognitive_computing.html

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Assoc. Prof. Ian Watson

Authors
  1. Assoc. Prof. Ian Watson
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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Watson, I. (2012). Digital Consciousness. In: The Universal Machine. Copernicus, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28102-0_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28102-0_14

  • Publisher Name: Copernicus, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-28101-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-28102-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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