I am glad to see Singapore still prizes human intelligence more than artificial intelligence. Singapore’s Agency for Science,Technology and Research (A*STAR) is offering $100,000 to the winner of a contest to build the next-generation search engine. That’s a fraction of the annual salary of Singapore ministers whose pay will range from nearly two million to more than three million Singapore dollars this year. (Two million Singapore dollars is about $1.39 million.)
I see nothing wrong with that. We can all create our own little search engines for free using Google Custom Search. But there is only one Lee Kuan Yew.
Still, for building the next-generation search engine, the prize money is inadequate, says search expert John Battelle. “Sorry, Singapore, that’s not enough scratch… that’s not gonna get it done,” he comments on his blog.
A*STAR says it wants developers to create:
a rich media search engine that will be smart enough to identify text, audio and video containing any word, even if that word, or search term, has not yet been tagged in the internet material. Millions of search engine users around the world stand to gain from such technologies that will help them navigate the rich material that is now on the Internet with the current Web 2.0 phenomenon and the proliferation of user-generated new media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Flickr.
Quite a mouthful, eh?
Contestants have to register by February 29 and the top five teams will be flown to Singapore for the finals in October.The winner will be decided by an international advisory panel which includes professors from Berkeley, Columbia, University of Washington and the National University of Singapore.
The contestants will have the satisfaction of competing with Google. A*Star’s quest is similar to Google’s own “vision for universal search”, said Google, which revealed plans to create such a search engine in May last year, reported ZDNet.
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