A.I. to compete on Jeopardy

How much longer 'til I can watch people compete against a computer, that is damn interesting!

Ever seen anyone play a video game?

On a more serious note: unless we can tell absolutely no difference between a human and a particular AI implementation, I doubt that it will ever gain social acceptance as a strong ("true") AI. A purpose-built Jeopardy-playing machine may be a spectacle to behold. However, it's not like anyone is going to congratulate such a "narrow", weak AI after its potential victory. Remember Deep Blue? Would you ascribe credit for its victory over chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov to Deep Blue itself, or to the engineers at IBM that built it?

In general, I think part of the problem with gaining social acceptance for strong AI is that any program achieves exactly what it's told to achieve. For instance, look at Diablo 2. It's a fun game to play, and the average player will find it very unpredictable. It's not like you can ever experience two identical games in it with the exact same items being dropped when killing Mephisto, right? Wrong. The "unpredictability" is usually based on something as simple as letting the program select one of a limited number of outcomes depending on what time it is. Since there is a discrete number of possible games, the exact same game conditions can be found again after a finite amount of time. Thus, if the same time-based game conditions are found and the game play is automated by a bot, the outcome and item drops will be exactly the same. Similarly, a soccer match between robots will have exactly the same outcome if all of its initial conditions are met. This is based on the assumption that there are no external influences (such as wind gusts) that can alter the trajectory of the ball, et cetera.

Of course, with more effort, you can use seemingly true randomness based on the white noise of a sound card, entropy of molecules, quantum decoherence and such. However, it can still be argued that a program can never escape its order of complexity to become something truly unexpected. That being said, Diablo 2 can still be very fun to play and it certainly appears truly random despite its limitations. If the technological singularity ever occurs, it will be mathematically beautiful but most likely still predictable. However, it will be predictable in such a complex way that that an unaided human is not likely to understand it.

Edit: Also, I find it preferable if news-containing posts don't start off with a link and a huge quoted segment. It doesn't look good on the portal as it only displays the first 750 characters.