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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."
Why employ real people when you can annoy the hell out of everyone who calls in by subjecting them to yet another tier of phone-bots.
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Sources say the code-name for IBM's project is "Connery".
Trebek : This nobleman is believed to have written many of Shakespeare's works.
"Connery" : [pause] So that's your game, is it, Trebek? I was a coveted performer among the brothel ladies while you were still pissing your knee-pants, boy.
Trebek : Can one of the IBM people fix the computer?
"Connery" : Your mother's a whore. But don't feel badly, Trebek. She's not a very good one. Ha ha, ha ha!
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
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...
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Anyone else hearing "I Lost on Jeopardy" in their heads at the moment?
I'm afraid you'll have to answer in the form of a question, Alex...
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.
FTA: 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.
I feel like someone should tell them how Jeopardy works... That thing isn't going to have too many questions to respond to.
Except at the "meet the contestant" part, maybe, which by the way should be fascinating.
Anyone else hearing "I Lost on Jeopardy" in their heads at the moment?
Now I am. Thanks for that. Jerk.
Good job.
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God help us if Jeopardy comes out with an answer containing the words "accidentally" and "the whole thing".
After years of trying to kill John Connors, Skynet realized its failure to achieve victory through brute strength and went back in time with a new objective: to win all human gameshows and use the prize money to buy off the entire planet instead.
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logs or it didn't happen! what they did to Kasparov was bullshit! Seriously if this magically gets better at 1/2 time, the least they can do is show the logs
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Robot: This is place where your papers are.
Subjugated Human: What is my home?
Robot: That is the incorrect question. Please follow me to a "processing station".
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Except at the "meet the contestant" part, maybe, which by the way should be fascinating.
"So, computer, you're about two months old, and you grew up in IBM's labs, right?"
"Bite my shiny metal ass"
I'll be very curious to see how well the computer buzzes in--which proves very challenging for some Jeopardy contestants. There is a visual cue given to the contenstants (a light around the question board--you can't see it on the TV) which let's everyone know when it is ok to buzz in. If you buzz in too early, you get locked out for a few seconds, effectively ruining your chance of answering. I wonder how the computer will know when to buzz in (if its not taking the visual cue, will the show tell the computer electronically?) and whether it will have an unfair advantage of being able to buzz at exactly the right moment. Buzzer ability turns out to be a core part of J! success.
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.
Anyone who thinks this is a trivial project has never watched Jeopardy.
Um... hello? Jeopardy is a trivia game show.
j/k
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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?
Mr. Trebek, would you like to play a game?
Table-ized A.I.
That's "Therapists"
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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They had to make some tough investment decisions: Either buy Sun, or build a Jeopardy playing supercomputer, but not both.
I'm sure that the machine's performance in Final Jeopardy will awe us sufficiently, and IBM's management will be exonerated from walking away from Sun.
IBM: "Hey, Larry Ellison! Have fun in your toy sailboat! Call us when your database and hardware synergies can compete with us in pre-prime time light entertainment game shows!"
Rumor has it that HP is working on a massively parallel Intel supercomputer that can calculate the strategic advantage of bidding one dollar ($1) on "The Price is Right."
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I got the chance to play this computer in a full game of Jeopardy. I must admit he had a decent lead right up to the point where he foolishly decided to bet 3/4 of his stack on the Audio Daily Double.
We were about even going into final Jeopardy when he stubbornly refused to offer any question for the answer "Smartest ever computer in the movies". I got it right (HAL) and took the prize.
The way to deal with such problems, Dr. Ferrucci said, is to improve the programâ(TM)s ability to understand the way Jeopardy! clues are offered. The complexity of the challenge is underscored by the subtlety involved in capturing the exact meaning of a spoken sentence. For example, the sentence "I never said she stole my money" can have seven different meanings depending on which word is stressed. "We love those sentences," Dr. Nyberg said. "Those are the ones we talk about when weâ(TM)re sitting around having beers after work."
Seriously guys, I just had a geek-gasm. Anyone else?
All they are proving is that it can recognize and parse human speech. Oh, I thought they were trying to do something difficult for a second. Thanks for the clarification..
I heard if IBM doesn't win, they will lay off 10,000 employees.
15,000 if it does win.
If you think
We were just talking about this in another thread... A lot o the comments here have been that natural language software isn't that great.
This isn't at all true. Today, understanding verbal and written communication is done by state of the art computers and programs at a rate about equal to human listeners and readers. Where a computer doesn't particularly excel is in parsing that language, mostly because a computer doesn't have access to our culture in order to absorb context, but context can still be added.
Here's an example from Ray Kurzweil's book "Age of Spiritual Machines." He talks about a phrase famously given to a language parsing program that goes thus: "Times flies like an arrow." This phrase can be understood in various ways:
"* The common simile: time moves quickly just like an arrow does;
* measure the speed of flies like you would measure that of an arrow (thus interpreted as an imperative) - i.e. (You should) time flies as you would (time) an arrow;
* measure the speed of flies like an arrow would - i.e. Time flies in the same way that an arrow would (time them);
* measure the speed of flies that are like arrows - i.e. Time those flies that are like arrows;
* all of a type of flying insect, "time-flies," collectively enjoys a single arrow (compare Fruit flies like a banana);
* each of a type of flying insect, "time-flies," individually enjoys a different arrow (similar comparison applies);
* A concrete object, for example the magazine, Time, travels through the air in an arrow-like manner."
(from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_processing)
With a few facts it becomes obvious which is correct and which isn't. Tell the computer that there's no such thing as a 'time fly' and that flies don't time things, and that flies aren't sophisticated enough to like things in an affectionate manner, etc., and the correct interpretation soon becomes clear.
So, if you think a computer can't understand both written and verbal communication and then parse it quickly enough to answer the questions I will have to strenuously disagree. These challenges are quickly being overcome on the bleeding edge of the art. But since this perception persists that the state of the art is somehow bad, because Joe down the street messed with some free-ware language software that worked poorly -- I think a lot of people are in for a surprise, and winning Jeopardy in this manner is really the perfect way to show it off. Can't wait to see the Youtube clips.
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