PassingNotes.com

okay, now this is some cool shit (from new scientist of course, just one more reason to pay top dollar for this pub)….a small firm in the people’s republic of cambridge (massachusetts) called icosystem has been working on software that blends a computer’s ability to search through information with a live sentient person’s ability to direct search activity based on what looks and feels right (aka, ‘a hunch‘)…

from the write-up, “imagine you could plug a computer into your brain and get the machine to do the donkey work while you concentrate on the creative bits…The “hunch engine” blends a computer’s ability to rapidly sift through a large number of possible solutions to a problem with human hunches for what looks or sounds right. Whether you are trying to think up a company name or find the perfect image on the web, the system does the hard work and lets you have all the fun…The algorithm behind the hunch engine was revealed at an emerging technology conference in San Diego, California, this week. Icosystem is now planning to develop the system to evolve better ways of searching the web.”

…right now they’ve been working on images (using flickr tags) and some other interesting stuff, like creating names for things (companies for example) - per the article, “To generate company names, users start by suggesting two words that describe their firm’s commercial focus…engine splits these words into their component sounds, jumbles them up, mutates them by adding randomly selected sounds and then spits out the resulting new set of names…user chooses two favorites to feed back in, and the process is repeated...”

…but if you really wanna geek out, try playing the game at the icosystem web site, it’s a powerful exercise in how intuition can sometimes fail us…oh, and very interesting, they’ve got a vertical solution geared toward recruiters…and uh, hey, why isn’t elgoog doing this? or yahoo? or microsoft? shit, i know jeeves, errrr, i mean ask will never get it, but these other guys are all supposed to be breaking ground, right? ….or are they just buying new ground?

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