AI, NEWTON AND THE TRIAL OF THE PYX

Their book has two goals. First, to document the reach of AI in everyday life: It’s now used to predict corn yields, track gender bias in films, map disease outbreaks and sort vegetables, among hundreds of other applications. But “AIQ” also aims to demystify AI. Each chapter focuses on an algorithm in a different industry, tracing the roots of each back to an innovator from before the computer era. One chapter goes back to Isaac Newton’s stint at the Royal Mint, another to Florence Nightingale’s medical reforms in Crimea, and so on. Each historical figure had a problem to solve and developed a novel solution. And luckily for later generations, the solution proved useful in fields far beyond the original.

The authors discuss, for instance, one of the problems that bedeviled Newton at the Mint: “anomaly detection”—the extreme variation in the weight and amount of silver used in each coin. For quality control, rather than weigh coins individually, the Mint would set aside a few thousand at random and weigh them all together—a process called the Trial of the Pyx. Unfortunately, Newton didn’t quite understand the mathematics of interpreting these results (a rare mistake for him), and it fell to later mathematicians to make the Trial accurate. But once they did, it opened a bonanza for later researchers: The authors write that “averaging lots of measurements together is the most important idea in the history of data science,” and can be used for everything from detecting credit-card fraud to hunting for radioactive bombs at ports.

Grounding AI in tried-and-true methods makes it seem less alien: Computers are simply faster ways to solve familiar problems. Hence the book’s title, a portmanteau of AI and IQ—the point being that we need both.

To read the complete article (subscription required), see:
‘AIQ’ Review: Getting Smarter All the Time (https://www.wsj.com/articles/aiq-review-getting-smarter-all-the-time-1527717048)

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