patterns and readiness-to-hand

Basic human coping skills like driving a car or playing ball seem based on the ability to recognize and respond to patterns, not solving equations or doing calculations. The general know-how involved here is based upon directly perceiving possibilities and acting on them, not knowing (implicitly or explicitly) that some set of facts holds.

I have to expand on this later, but I wonder if there's a connection to be made between patterns and pattern-recognition and Heidegger's account of being-in-the-world in Division I of Being and Time.

elementary

From the New York Times Magazine:

“Toured the Burj in this U.A.E. city. They say it’s the tallest tower in the world; looked over the ledge and lost my lunch.”

This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge”), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

Neither, as it turned out. Both were beaten to the buzzer by the third combatant: Watson, a supercomputer.

It's fascinating news. For me, the most interesting part of the article was seeing how advanced the algorithms are. You have programmers who are waiting for the hardware to catch up. That's a really good sign as far as AI goes, since the main anxieties aren't hardware-related but are software-related.