Computer beats Jeopardy champs

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2011/01/14/computer-jeopardy.html

by awk • 16 years ago

23 15 16 years ago

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

Hardly amazing that a computer with access to billions of pages of information can out-trivia humans.

I suppose the story here is supposed to be the natural language processing, but really the space which is covered by Jeopardy questions is pretty confined. Color me unimpressed.

Qz• 16 years ago

Have you watched Jeopardy ever? The 'questions' are often pretty obscurely worded, and the IBM computer often comes to completely bonkers conclusions despite your supposed 'confined question space'.

dnautics3• 16 years ago

I want to see it go on 'are you smarter than a fifth grader'. The sorts of questions they should ask aren't ones that require knowledge but creativity, understanding, and elision of concepts. For example:

If Dog is three and elephant is eight then what is ostrich?

Guarantee a fifth grader gets seven, but Watson is stumped.

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

I have watched Jeopardy. It's questions are no more obscurely worded than what my mom types into a search engine. The search engine is often able to produce reasonable results, which is impressive in isolation and I recognize the difficulty of that, but not something to make a huge PR event out of, as there are many applications with similar parsing ability (like search engines).

Jeopardy always words something in the same format with a lot of information about the answer. Perhaps I am too far removed, but to me it doesn't seem like a huge advance in natural language research or anything worth all this attention. It's clearly a PR event purchased by IBM to try to sell more software along that line, hardly revolutionary.

cryodesign2• 16 years ago

Ignorance is bliss so they say. This is not about a computer beating humans in trivia questions, but about computers learning to understand humans. This is a major milestone in natural language processing and imagine what this can do when it will be available on a wider scale.

Watch this please:

Building Watson - A Brief Overview of the DeepQA Project http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc

dnautics3• 16 years ago

Yes, but that's the point, it doesn't actually "understand". When it answers a question in the category of "rhyme time" it's not because it actually understands what a rhyme is, but because it's been programmed to. If Jeopardy renamed the rhyme time category "time rhyme" (requiring the contestant to rhyme AND invert) watson would be up the creek, whereas someone like Ken Jennings could probably even figure it out without Alex Trebek explaining the category, and you or I would figure out the scheme after flubbing the first one.

shasta• 16 years ago

Anyone know how the buzzers work? It's my impression that they are disabled until a moment after the question has been read completely, and then the first to buzz in gets a chance to answer. I wonder if they took steps to ensure that the computer doesn't have an edge in buzzing in first.

StavrosK• 16 years ago

I think that's how it works (they only get enabled after the question has been read, while you get penalised somehow if you buzz in too early. I imagine they built in some random delays so the computer didn't always buzz in at the millisecond.

klenwell2• 16 years ago

That would have been very sporting of them as I recall seeing an interview with Jeopardy winners where they mentioned the crucial role the buzzer plays in the game and how skill with it provides a competitive advantage.

dmix• 16 years ago

There is an excellent comment on Reddit by an ex-Jeopardy player who explains how the buttons work and why it matters with AI.

http://www.reddit.com/r/cogsci/comments/f253c/watch_ibms_wat...

rianjs• 16 years ago

Engadget has a video of the actual contest, and an interview with the IBM guys:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/13/ibms-watson-supercomputer...

Computer beats Jeopardy champs

Related Stories