MIT professor and ThinkPad superfan: "Storytelling" machines key to unlocking artificial intelligence - Lenovo Think Stories

In Winston's Genesis Group, which is part of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Winston and squadrons of his students have painstakingly built technology that can analyze roughly 100-line texts written for computers on subjects such as Shakespeare, international cyber conflict, and fairy tales. Genesis compares stories; detects concepts such as love or revenge, even when they are not named; concludes whether a short-term gain leads to a long-term loss; and explains acts based on personality traits. The system can even analyze a text through a filter of cultural bias, thus interpreting an event like the cyber attack on Estonia by Russia in 2007 from the point of view of people in one or the other country.