I talk to a lot of people and almost all of them turn out to have at least one application for RubberSquid; many of them have lots and go on to use it voraciously.
But there is one type that just refuses to get it – the geek – the hardcore, die-hard techie that thinks it knows absolutely everything about everything. You know: vintage T-Shirts; issues with personal hygiene; incapable of understanding how all the other fools in the world could possibly be so stupid as to not agree with their point of view. It is, thankfully, a rare breed - and indeed, unlikely to breed owing to its substantial defficiency in social skills.
Nevertheless, it is with the geek that I most enjoy talking about RubberSquid. It challenges; it sneers; it scorns - it wants me to know that it knows all about machine intelligence – it is, after all, a geek!
So, I thought I’d take the opportunity to explore some of the questions I get asked by the geek as a way of expanding on RubberSquid’s artificial intelligence without trying to wrap it all up in fluffy marketing and sales speak. Here goes.
What do you mean by intelligence?
Intelligence is simply the capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of logical activity; it is an aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.
What do you mean by Artificial Intelligence?
The term AI In the context of RubberSquid refers to the system’s ability to process unstructured natural language text without the need for human intervention. The key here is the fact that the text is unstructured – no need for anybody to pre-process it with tags, or to create a domain specific dictionary and no need for the author to write the text to any particular semantic or structural rules – RubberSquid AI can extract meaning from unstructured text. Period.
But, there are plenty of more advanced AI based systems out there…
True. There are some highly sophisticated systems out there such as that delivered by Autonomy (www.autonomy.com) to name but one.
These high-end systems often have the capability to analyse the semantics of the type of complex sentences found in legal, scientific and medical texts; information domains that require very high levels of accuracy. As a consequence, these systems are very expensive to purchase and to own. They need a team of knowledge engineers to bring them online and configure them to understand the application’s particular information domain, and they need powerful and expensive computing resources to run them.
They are, in short, not for us mere mortals. RubberSquid on the other hand is, and makes simple, pragmatic, meaning-based computing available to everybody
So you’re saying that RubberSquid’s AI is primitive?
If you mean that it’s simplified in order to make it FAST, EASY to use and AFFORDABLE, then I suppose the answer is yes.
But think on this: is it better to have primitive intelligence that boosts your productivity by say one-third than no intelligence at all? And actually, what percentage boost do you need to make an intelligent system useful? 50%? 75%? It could be argued that a low-cost system capable of boosting information management performance by as little as 10% is useful and earning its keep.
Prove that RubberSquid is “Intelligent”
No. You prove that it isn’t.
The more information you load into a RubberSquid channel, the more intelligently it behaves. Users find that their queries are answered fast and efficiently, and that they can more easily find and extract the information they need. It’s impossible to quantify the value of this performance boost to a user, but it certainly represents a substantial qualitive improvement in their ability to access information.
Ok then, what type of AI does RubberSquid use?
Well, that’s our secret sauce.
All we can say is that by combining a set of relatively simple concepts in a very particular order, we are able to demonstrate a type of emergent intelligence that delivers tangible results.
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So, geeks back-off! We created RubberSquid for people with things going on in their lives, people who don’t think it’s cool spending night and day in front of a screen. People that don’t get turned on by a water-cooled Cray-wanabe built out of old slot machine parts, and with real friends in the real world.
Posted by squidblog 