INFORMATION RETRIEVAL, QUESTION ANSWERING SYSTEMS, AND CHATGPT: TECHNOLOGY, CAPABILITY, AND INTELLIGENCE: Received: 11th April 2023; Revised: 31st July 2023, 10th August 2023, 16th August 2023; Accepted: 1st September 2023

The question is will ChatGPT replace Google? To answer the question, we have a look at the engine that powers ChatGPT. Knowing the engine that drives it, we may be able to estimate its capability and power. Information retrieval and question answering systems have been around for decades using well known technology to serve their purposes, such as keywords approach, semantic technology, predicate logic, and natural language processing. Several WH questions have been tested to assess the quality and the correctness of the answers given by ChatGPT. With respect to What, Where, and How questions, we found that ChatGPT seems to understand the questions and answer them quite well. But some facts embedded in the answers are found to be inaccurate. These may be due to the “hallucination” problem caused by the Large Language Models (LLMs) adopted in the engine. We wonder here whether ChatGPT, which adopts the Generative Pre-trained Transformer based on LLMs, has reasoning mechanism as in the rule-based systems. In conclusion, ChatGPT represents a significant leap forward in the field of question answering systems. However, it is important to recognize that ChatGPT and Google are not direct competitors, but rather complementary tools that serve different purposes

Range detection approach in interactive virtual heritage walkthrough

Exploring virtual world will give a memorable experience to the users. Generally, they are expecting smooth navigation with high quality image drawn into their eyes. Nevertheless, when the virtual world is growing simultaneously with the number of objects, the navigation will be detained. Yet, the frame rates can become unacceptable. In this paper, we present and examine range detection approach for view frustum culling to effectively speed-up the interactive virtual heritage project namely Ancient Malacca Virtual Walkthrough. Normal six plane view frustum culling approach use the plane equation to test whether objects is within the visible region. However, range detection approach is different with normal six plane view frustum. It is based on camera referential point and tests the objects if they are in the viewing range. The results show that this approach is able to increase the rendering performance of the virtual walkthrough without sacrificing the visual quality