DailyDirt: Fooling Some Of The People Some Of The Time...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, May 7th 2012 5:00pm — Michael Ho

There's a sucker born every minute -- if you like to believe unverifiable statistics. Usually, if it's too good to be true, it ain't true. But as technology gets better, sometimes it's hard to distinguish sufficiently advanced algorithms from magic. Here are a few scams that successfully fooled some folks for a while.

A stock-picking robot named Marl convinced thousands of investors that it could identify penny stocks that were about to soar in price. The SEC is looking to impose a fine and force the creators of Marl to repay their duped investors... but with claims on a website like: "The longer Marl is allowed to run on a computer … The More Advanced He Becomes!" How could anyone go wrong? [url]
Penn and Teller don't usually do pranks, but when it comes to tricking Nobel prize laureate, Arno Penzias, they apparently make exceptions. Creating a fake computer with voice recognition in the late 1980s fooled this brilliant physicist, but nowadays Apple's Siri is in TV ads all the time doing nearly the same routine. [url]
Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built a mechanical chess-playing machine (shaped like a Turk...) that gained widespread fame in 1769. This mechanical turk was actually controlled by a hidden human being, but only a few hundred years later, we actually could build a chess playing robot with grandmaster skills. [url]
To discover more interesting AI-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: chess, fraud, marl, nobel prize, penn and teller, sec, siri, statistics

5 Comments

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Rekrul, 7 May 2012 @ 5:34pm

Creating a fake computer with voice recognition in the late 1980s fooled this brilliant physicist, but nowadays Apple's Siri is in TV ads all the time doing nearly the same routine.

Just recently, I was in a doctor's office and the woman next to me in the waiting room was trying to get directions to some service station using Siri. She kept referring to it as "she", as in "She's usually pretty good." Of course it completely failed to find the specific business that she wanted.
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Anonymous Coward, 7 May 2012 @ 5:37pm

Obama fooled the entire Nobel committee who gave him an award for not being as evil as Bush, or so they thought.

Maybe they should have waited.
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Michael Ho (profile), 7 May 2012 @ 6:31pm

Re:
The TV commercials for Siri do seem to suggest that Siri is much better than "she" is... I wonder if people would be more upset with Siri if "she" had a more manly name and voice? (I vaguely remember some study where GPS directions given by an artificial female voice was more irritating than if it was spoken by an artificial male voice.)
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abc gum, 7 May 2012 @ 6:34pm

Re:
Possibly one might look deeper into occurrences in an attempt at greater understanding - but then again, maybe not.
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Rekrul, 8 May 2012 @ 10:08am

Re: Re:
(I vaguely remember some study where GPS directions given by an artificial female voice was more irritating than if it was spoken by an artificial male voice.)

I want a GPS programmed with William Daniels's voice. :)
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