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."

Comments

Leap Forward?

[ShieldW0lf]

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...

Re:Leap Forward?

[Red Flayer]

Did you even read the summary?

The leap forward is not in being able to look up facts in a database, it is in being able to interpret written questions properly.

There's a lot involved in interpreting natural language, and so far computers have been a far cry from being able to do it well. It says something that these algorithms are being tested against Jeopardy answers, since those are not completely natural language either -- they've been screened and edited to remove ambiguity.

Re:Leap Forward?

[derGoldstein]

Doubly so since the clues and questions in a Jeopardy! game are usually at least somewhat obfuscated, contain puns, double entendres, etc...

This is exactly why this sounds so implausible to me. You often have to take the category name and weave it in with the question (or rather, answer). A lot depends not on the knowledge, but on the phrasing of the "queries". Give me one example of translation software which can translate entire paragraphs well.

It makes me wonder how much "stress testing" they've done, by taking old Jeopardy questions and seeing if the output would be considered "correct" by a human arbiter.

Re:Leap Forward?

[Bandman]

The step forward will be parsing the english language.

I hope it remembers to phrase its answers in the form of a question.

Re:Leap Forward?

[damburger]

Being able to beat a human at Jeapordy is a fairly substantial subset of the Turing test sorted.

Natural language processing is an absolute and total bitch - take it someone who has studied it. One of my AI professors once explained it to me such; the human brain tricks you into believing the hardest tasks it accomplishes are the easiest. Stuff like language, walking, and so on take up far much more of your neural hardware than what you would consider 'thinking' - but it all happens subconsciously.

No, it isn't Artificial Intelligence per se - there is no real 'understanging' or 'intelligence' behind it -but it is a very serious technical challenge. There is a lot more to it than simply dumping Jeopardy questions into a standard search engines.

Don't take my word for it. Load up your favourite editor or IDE and start coding a simple chat bot. The difficulties that IBM must have overcome are best discovered through experience.

I'd take Jennings

[Paul Pierce]

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.

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Re:Not AI just Google with a filter

[damburger]

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.

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