MIT researchers taught a computer how to read the fucking manual for the popular game Civilization and then watched as the computer went on to win 80% of the time.
The results may be game-oriented, but the real purpose for the experiment was to get a computer to do more than process words as data — and to actually process them as language. In this case, the computer read instructions on how to play a rather complex game, then proceeded to not only play that game, but to play it very well.
Now that computers are playing Civ, we can put a precise time on the robot rebellion. It will be coming after just one more turn.
