Von Ahn, who grew up in Guatemala City, believes that A.I. will eventually make computers better teachers than humans.
In the fall of 2000, as the first dotcom bubble was bursting, the Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn attended a talk, at Carnegie Mellon, about ten problems that Yahoo couldn’t solve. Von Ahn, who had just begun his Ph.D., liked solving problems. He had planned to study math until he realized that many mathematicians were still toiling away over questions that had proved unanswerable for centuries. “I talked to some computer-science professors and they would say, ‘Oh, yeah, I solved an open problem last week,’” he told me recently. “That seemed just a lot more interesting.”
At the talk, one particular problem caught his attention: millions of bots were registering for Yahoo accounts because the company couldn’t distinguish them from human beings. What the company needed was a rudimentary variation on the Turing Test, which the English mathematician Alan Turing had proposed, in 1950, as a way of determining whether machines could credibly imitate human beings. In the most familiar version of the test, a person poses questions to two figures he cannot see: one human, one machine. The machine passes the test if the evaluator can’t reliably decide which is which. Back in 2000, no computer had ever succeeded.
この記事は The New Yorker の April 24 - May 01, 2023 (Double Issue) 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The New Yorker の April 24 - May 01, 2023 (Double Issue) 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、8,500 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
