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CSI Gets More Real: New Software Helps Develop Hunches
We love our sleuthing and problem solving. From Sherlock Holmes to the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew to the Law & Order and CSI TV shows, we like playing private detective collecting clues and solving crimes before it is revealed. We piece observations and insights together along with the actual facts and historical experience to arrive at our conclusion.
Or, looking at it more simply, we love our problem solving games like the daily crossword, Soduku or even Wheel of Fortune.
We pride ourselves as human beings having good intuition or hunches, something a computer could never have. After all, people still beat IBM's Big Blue at chess. Right?
All those CSI shows on TV use some pretty fancy sci-fi worthy computers and software programs to help them analyze evidence for crime clues. Those electronic tools are great at identifying analytic results, linking zeros and ones together digtially to show correlations and other statistical likelihoods.
However, humans are better at taking the analytic information and understanding the true pattens. Otherwise, Gil, Horatio and Mac wouldn't have jobs and we wouldn't tune in.
Those CSI sleuths may have some new real-life competition: computers that can determine "hunches".
The latest Wired magazine presents a twist on evolutionary computation called the "hunch engine", which promises to let computers produce everything from more-attractive photos to new pharmaceutical candidates, one nudge at a time.
posted by Unknown @ Monday, March 13, 2006,
