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CLEARLY, Garry Kasparov’s recent defeat by IBM’s Deep Blue
(http://www.chess.ibm.com/) shows progress has been made, but computers still
have a long way to go—humans are not yet the living equivalent of the
obsolete Sinclair ZX-81. A look at the state of AI on the Net may restore your
faith in humanity. When a computer steps away from the rule-bound chess arena
and interacts with the real world, its limitations become clear. Even the
computers at MIT’s world-famous AI lab (http://www.ai.mit.edu/) can’t think yet.
The lab is still struggling to develop computers that can make sense of what they
see, recognise people and understand simple questions in the English language.

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