en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
2 corrections found
the 1996 victory of IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer in a chess match with grandmaster Garry Kasparov
Deep Blue did not win its six-game match against Garry Kasparov in 1996; Kasparov won that match 4–2. Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in the 1997 rematch.
Full reasoning
This claim gets the year of Deep Blue's match victory wrong.
IBM's own research page states that Deep Blue defeated reigning world champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1997, not 1996. Contemporary historical summaries of the 1996 match likewise say Kasparov won the 1996 match, even though Deep Blue won the first game.
So the article's wording is inaccurate in two ways:
- 1996 was not the year Deep Blue won the match; Kasparov won the 1996 six-game match 4–2.
- Deep Blue's match victory happened in 1997, in the rematch.
A more accurate phrasing would be that Deep Blue's performance against Kasparov showed that machines could exceed humans on some tasks, with Kasparov winning the 1996 match and Deep Blue winning the 1997 rematch.
2 sources
- Deep Blue for Artificial Intelligence - IBM Research
Deep Blue is the chess machine that defeated then-reigning World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match in 1997.
- Chess champion Garry Kasparov defeats IBM’s Deep Blue | HISTORY
The six-game match between Kasparov and Deep Blue began on February 10, 1996... The IBM team had been working to upgrade Deep Blue since its 1996 defeat to Kasparov.
The digital information created by humans has reached a similar magnitude to biological information in the biosphere.
This overstates how much digital information exists relative to biology. The cited 2016 paper says digital storage was about 5×10^21 bytes in 2014, while DNA in all cells on Earth contains about 1.325×10^37 bytes—roughly 2.65 quadrillion times more.
Full reasoning
The sentence says human-created digital information has already reached a magnitude similar to biological information in the biosphere. But the source material it appears to draw on gives numbers showing that this is not yet true if "biological information in the biosphere" means the DNA information content of life on Earth.
The 2016 Trends in Ecology & Evolution paper states:
- digital storage in 2014 was about 5 × 10^21 bytes;
- the DNA in all cells on Earth contains about 1.325 × 10^37 bytes of information;
- at then-current growth rates, digital storage would only rival total biosphere DNA information in about 110 years.
That means digital storage in 2014 was about 2.65 × 10^15 times smaller than the total DNA information content of the biosphere. A gap of roughly 15 orders of magnitude is not a "similar magnitude."
The paper does say digital storage already exceeded the total information in all human genomes and might rival all DNA in the biosphere in the future, but that is different from saying it has already reached a similar magnitude to biological information in the biosphere.
1 source
- Information in the Biosphere: Biological and Digital Worlds (preprint of Trends in Ecology & Evolution article)
During the last three decades, the quantity of digital information stored has doubled about every 2.5 years, reaching about 5 zettabytes in 2014 (5 x 10^21 Bytes)... The total amount of DNA contained in all the cells on Earth is estimated to be about 5.3 x 10^37 base pairs, equivalent to 1.325 x 10^37 Bytes of information... it will rival the total information content contained in all the DNA in all the cells on Earth in about 110 years.