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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."
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.
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.
According to TFA, the machine will get its questions as machine-readable text. The other human contestants will get it as text and audio. Also, the machine will not be connected to the internet.
Go somewhere random
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.
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.
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?