Hot!

Weren't we just complaining about the cold? Today we turned on the a/c and postponed out evening walk until after sundown.

This afternoon we danced to Darryl. He worked on various counter rotates. Some are pretty straightforward, but others could be really hard to see. Steve and Jan were there, and we got to dance with them in one square.

Tonight we watched a NOVA we had saved, titled "The Smartest Machine on Earth." It was about the development of Watson and the difficulties of building machine intelligence. Watson's secret is that it was programmed not only with encyclopedias full of information and reams of "rules" providing commensense information--but also by offering it opportunities for machine learning. That means providing it with lots of examples, so that it can learn what answers are correct and what evidence is important. Watson's early tests didn't show much promise, and the Jeopardy producers weren't impressed, but the machine (named for the founder of IBM) improved steadily.