The spirit is willing with Google Maps
April 13, 2007, 3:07 pm |
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By Andrew L. Jaffee
When I asked Google Maps to “Get directions” from New York to London, step #23 advised me to “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 mi,” get out of the water on the shores of northern France, drive 200 miles up the coast, and then cross the Channel to the UK. The map even shows me which pier I should jump off into the Atlantic to start my epic Leif Ericsson quest.
Does Google Maps’ geo algorithm have a slight bug, or has some programmer hidden a virtual Easter egg in the company’s code? The world of complex software applications is an interesting reality, artistic as much as scientific, sometimes dangerous, but also good for decent chuckle. [Continues below image…]
Google Maps’ Athletic Directions (click to englarge)
In 1950, Professor Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computing, devised a benchmark to determine a device’s ability to demonstrate intelligence. The Turing Test, as it is now commonly known, proposed that if a human believes a machine possesses intelligence, then the machine is in fact intelligent, or more specifically:
…a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of the machine instead of its ability to render words into audio), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel such as a teletype machine…
An early experiment with artificial intelligence took Matthew’s (26:41) “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” and fed it into a program for translation from English to Russian and back to English. The output: “The vodka is good, but the steak is lousy.” Google Maps’ code, probably algorithmic, and not heuristic, for directions from New York to London resulting in, “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean 3,462 mi,” may not be as classic as “The vodka is good,” but it’s up there with the best of them.
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