Harish Natarajan has won over IBM’s six-year-old artificial intelligence (AI) debating system, affectionately dubbed “Miss Debater”.
TheNewsGuru (TNG) reports the debate audience handed 31-year-old Natarajan victory over the AI debating system after a 25-minute rapid-fire exchange about pre-school subsidies.
While the debating system, Miss Debater argued that subsidizing preschools isn’t just a matter of finance, but a moral and political duty to protect some of society’s most vulnerable children, Natarajan countered that, too often, subsidies function as politically motivated giveaways to the middle class.
In 1996, IBM created a computer system that beat a chess grandmaster for the first time. In 2011, its Watson supercomputer defeated two record-winning “Jeopardy!” contestants.
Also, Alphabet’s AlphaGo famously proved AI can master the ancient and intricate game of Go.
But debating, which requires creativity and emotive elocution, has proven more elusive.
Natarajan and the AI debating system event unfolded in front of hundreds of journalists, tech industry insiders and software engineers at IBM’s Think conference in downtown San Francisco.
The topic was “We should subsidize preschools”.
Natarajan holds the world record for most debate competition victories and has attended three world championships, winning the European tournament in 2012.