My Current Favorite Unsolved Problem in Computer Science
My current favorite unsolved problem in Computer Science is … Search. Google has not solved search. OpenAI is getting better. There are billions of pages on the web, and I need a way for the web to answer the search query: “Show me all the pages that I might be interested in seeing”. Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the Media Lab at MIT, envisioned a digital newspaper called “The Daily Me”, which would be an expert on me, and everyday show me all the newspaper articles that I personally might be interested in reading. Negroponte was talking in the 1990s on the basis of his insight into what computers should, ideally, be able to do, but Machine Learning based Artificial Intelligence technology actually makes this possible, and indeed there are currently electronic newspapers available along the lines of The Daily Me. I need a similar service for the web. Right now, searching for subtle web pages is a painful process, and I need a search engine that can give an answer to my query: Show me all the pages that I might be interested in seeing, given everything you know about me so far.