Talk:894: Progeny

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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I believe Megan is talking about actual teaching, not programming. Computers can gather data, can analyze data, can learn, and can mimic human behavior. But, they can't teach others what they know. Cueball's response indicates how little value we as a society place on this skill (i.e. look at the salary of a teacher versus an entertainer of any kind). The title text makes fun of teaching our children values by suggesting we are just trying to hold on to our ability to beat them in something. 67.78.183.206 19:34, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Computers can teach each other pretty well, even without human intervention if you turn automatic updates on. Also, there are computers teaching humans now - although they can't really teach them all they know, only the things they have teaching programs for. I think that the amount of things computers can't do is rapidly approaching zero. Luckily, there are still lot of things they do much worse that humans, including teaching or inventing better computers. -- Hkmaly (talk) 11:35, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I've changed most of the explanation. The first change was that Watson was actually fed a text file containing the question as Trebek was reading it to the human competitors. The game would have been much different if IBM also had to invent a world class speech-to-text system that would then feed into the trivia database. Second change is to why Megan is saying we're good at teaching, programming is a form of teaching: allowing a computer to understand. Third, replaced the title text explanation. lcarsos_a (talk) 19:50, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Maybe a link to xkcd.com/1002/ would be good? evbneto 18:30, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

You mean link like this? 1002. -- Hkmaly (talk) 11:36, 5 December 2013 (UTC)