Slashdot Mirror
IBM Computer Program To Take On 'Jeopardy!'
longacre writes "I.B.M. plans to announce Monday that it is in the final stages of completing a computer program to compete against human 'Jeopardy!' contestants. If the program beats the humans, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward. ... The team is aiming not at a true thinking machine but at a new class of software that can 'understand' human questions and respond to them correctly. Such a program would have enormous economic implications. ... The proposed contest is an effort by I.B.M. to prove that its researchers can make significant technical progress by picking "grand challenges" like its early chess foray. The new bid is based on three years of work by a team that has grown to 20 experts in fields like natural language processing, machine learning and information retrieval. ... Under the rules of the match that the company has negotiated with the 'Jeopardy!' producers, the computer will not have to emulate all human qualities. It will receive questions as electronic text. The human contestants will both see the text of each question and hear it spoken by the show's host, Alex Trebek. ... Mr. Friedman added that they were also thinking about whom the human contestants should be and were considering inviting Ken Jennings, the 'Jeopardy!' contestant who won 74 consecutive times and collected $2.52 million in 2004."
I.B.M. plans to announce Monday that it is in the final stages of completing a computer program to compete against human 'Jeopardy!' contestants. If the program beats the humans, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward.
In what way would this be a leap forward? Looking up trivial facts in a database and spitting them out is easy, and not particularly significant...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
That guy will beat anyone.
The problem they might run into is the speed of pressing the button to respond. I would imagine the computer would be able to beat the human every time it knew the answer.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Actually, yes, it is. See, it's not just general knowledge, but, as about 9 billion other people in this thread pointed out, there are puns and other wordplay often involved.
What do you think the proper Jeopardy answer to this question is (in the category "Much Ado" for $100):
"It's the spirit that gets things done."
Answer: What is "can do"
The $500 version might be something like, "This recently hip-again party favorite was first created in New York."
Answer: What is "fondue"
Both of those are pretty easy examples. Both require the computer to "get" the wordplay in the topic (aDO), one requires that it understand that pronunciation of the word in the answer is the key, and numerous other things that I probably take for granted but are rather non-trivial things for a computer to do.
If they can get the machine doing reasonably well on those kinds of questions for Jeopardy, I'd love to see them go after "You Don't Know Jack" next. I've seen many reasonably bright people completely unable to handle that game when it came to the punny or obfuscated questions.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
So... why Jeopardy? IBM is trying to demonstrate software that can parse text for meaning. That's great. But there are plenty of other places/formats/etc. that you can demonstrate this technology. There are certainly far more useful applications of this sort of technology.
I'm guessing that they they are going after J! because...
1) The warm spotlight of a well-known TV show
2) There is still a lot of structure and form on J! that it's easier to achieve "success" than if they had the machine do something more free-form... e.g., read a novel and generate a plot summary or, heavens forbid, actually understand real human conversation
3) The computer could have other advantages, like impeccable buzzer timing (which is sometimes more important than actual knowledge, especially in the Tournament of Champions) and having memorized the material beforehand (the NYT indicates that it would have "read" study materials before the match), which also helps increase the likelihood of "success"
And to pile on the criticism of grandstanding, the machine will be fed electronic text. So no video camera to perform text recognition? No speech recognition (IBM afraid of the "wreck a nice beach" vs. "recognize speech" problem tripping up their theatrics?). And what use would this be? At least the AI text research done at Google is being put to good use, like improving their machine translation services. Aside from getting IBM's name plastered in the media, what exactly is this going to do?
No argument will show you how wrong you are - please just try to code something similar. Or even a chat bot. Things like language processing and image recognition seem easy to humans because most of your brains activity is hidden from your conscious mind. Try making a computer do these things, and you will discover that what IBM is nontrivial.
Neither was selling calculating equipment to the Nazis either, like you said.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Comment removed based on user account deletion