Quote:
Originally Posted by RimmerOdds
Put computing to solve issues of water and world hunger then. Bots playing great online players in NL is terrible for the game and the future of it. The bots will learn significantly from this. That is not good for anyone who loves the game except the ones who have access to the code or share what it thinks with their friends.
The issue is, and in history it tends to work out this way, is that we make substantial strides in technological advancement by chasing things that the average person may think is useless or frivolous.
Many people think the moon landing, space exploration is a waste of time, they always ask, why don't we spend that X dollars on xyz project etc etc. The issue is when we chase things that are "frivolous" we make a lot of discoveries along the way that benefit our daily lives. The moon landing spawned the early technology that would give us satellite navigation, ear thermometers, non reflective displays, smoke detectors, and more.
Watson is doing the same thing, scientists at IBM initially started the project with the goal of using it to play Jeopardy, because they wanted a computer that could answer questions posed to it in natural language. Now that they have proven they could do that with the Jeopardy results, they are now making available the hardware/software to other people so that they may adapt Watson to solve other problems, problems that are way more complex niche in scope, such as finance, legal research, telecom, and healthcare/education development when compared to the initial problem of answering trivia questions.
With regards to good/not good for the game, I don't think that's a point in trying to put the genie in the bottle. People will always try to see if they can build a computer to outsmart another computer, it's been done in Chess with DeepBlue. People will apply it in Poker, and the Poker community can either sit on the sidelines and just watch, or they can be a part of it and ensure that these competitions and the resulting technology will be used for good.