How about building a article robot like Watson (from jeopardy).

Did anyone catch the IBM watson challenge on jeopardy? Basically IBM built a supercomputer that was able to play jeopardy. The computer got so advanced that watson played the two best jeopardy players in the world. Watson won. Now thats impressive.

Another impressive thing is listening at how the watson computer works. The engineers explain it nicely in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc

I was thinking, perhaps similar technology could be developed and deployed to write articles. Basically the way watson works is that the engineers loaded massive amounts of data to the computer's hard drive stuff like wikipedia, the bible, every national geographic magazine, imdb etc. Its this data that watson looks through to find answers to the questions.

Another thing that watson does is something called machine learning, basically watson takes feedback from the game and actually learns how to answer future questions of the same nature.

The same technologies could be applied to article writing. For example, this computer would be browsing the internet (rss feeds, google news, google trends etc.) to find trends that are occurring in the world. When the computer finds a relevant article to write it starts querying the internet for data that would be relevant to the topic (doing research). During this process it would download the relevant wikipedia articles, relevant related articles and so on. Using this data it would then analyze it and write a relevant, high quality article. The articles would be high quality because they would be factually true and provide relevant news. You would literally be spinning content from thousands of webpages to write a 100% unique article.

Such a task would be difficult to do but well worth it.

A nice idea... however:

"The Watson supercomputer that appeared on Jeopardy last week was made up of 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers powered by 8-core processors -- four in each machine for a total of 32 processors per machine. The servers are virtualized using a Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) implementation, creating a server cluster with a total processing capacity of 80 teraflops. A teraflop is one trillion operations per second.

According to Tony Pearson, master inventor and senior consultant at IBM, a Power 750 server retails for $34,500. Thus the 90 that make up Watson would cost about $3 million."

Don't know about you but I don't have a $3mil budget (actually thats just out of the box hardware cost) for article creation

Yeah I agree, nice idea and if someone were to develop such a software, it wouldn't take nearly as much computing power as Watson. But most likely would require much more than the ordinary desktop PC. It would probably also require a large budget to develop.

Maybe some millionaire guru's can team up together on this.

True but with every obstacle there is a solution.

who is to say that such a software would require Watson style computing power? The only reason they needed so much computing power was because watson needed to scan through all of humanity's knowledge in less than a second and figure out which of that knowledge was relevant to the question being asked.