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'Jeopardy!' To Pit Humans Against IBM Machine
digitaldc writes "The game show Jeopardy! will pit man versus machine this winter in a competition that will show how successful scientists are in creating a computer that can mimic human intelligence. Two of the venerable game show's most successful champions — Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter — will play two games against 'Watson,' a computer program developed by IBM's artificial intelligence team. The matches will be spread over three days that will air Feb. 14-16, the game show said on Tuesday. The competition is reminiscent of when IBM developed a chess-playing computer to compete against chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997."
What is first post?
A computer will be much better at facts. So it's mostly a question of grammar. And the hardest problem is likely figuring out wordplay, which occasionally comes up in jeopardy.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
As in, can Watson properly misinterpret such categories as The Pen Is Mightier or An Album Cover?
I am officially gone from
A computer will be much better at facts. So it's mostly a question of grammar. And the hardest problem is likely figuring out wordplay, which occasionally comes up in jeopardy.
If you think this is true, you can play against Watson online. About seven years ago, I saw some pretty impressive crossword solvers that were decent at wordplay and I've imagined they've gotten much better at developing novel links between words to exploit puns and the like. Never perfect but slowly getting better in odd ways -- like most of AI.
We've discussed this so many times it hurts. I've wanted to watch this for almost a year, I was hoping Jeopardy! wouldn't need to milk this hype for all it's worth to stay relevant.
My work here is dung.
...suck it Trebek?
It's Jeopardy -- the question must be given in the form of an answer.
Depends. Is the computer allowed to use wikipedia (during the show, or somewhere in the past)?
Otherwise, the computer knows only as much as the programmers have taught it.
Asking whether it's allowed to use an archived (or, more likely, well-indexed) copy of wikipedia is like asking whether the human contestants are allowed to remember something they read on wikipedia. There's no question that computers can store more information than humans; that's not what this is testing, and it's probably a fair guess that "Watson" will have the answer to most every question asked. The hard part, however, is parsing the clues and understanding what they're looking for with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and doing so faster than the human contestants. Humans are great at this sort of thing, and it's really hard to write a program that does it at all well.
Then this will be pretty thoroughly uneventful. I easily beat it without looking at the internet at all. It managed to get answers very severely wrong. It did manage to hit a couple of the before and after which it seemed to have a particularly hard time with.
At this year's CASCON, I spoke to Murray Campbell from IBM. He's one of the lead people who work on this project and who also worked on Deep Blue. I discussed this with him. My girlfriend had told me that she also had no difficulty beating the online demo. He answered that the online demo is only a part of the system, and that their full system routinely beats top Jeopardy players. They're going to showcase their system on TV because they truly believe it has a chance at winning.
Unrelated to this, I also learned that Deep Blue had custom processors engineered and fabricated (VLSI) just to be chess accelerators. Prior to this, I always thought the machine was a relatively powerful supercomputer (with general purpose hardware) running their custom chess software. It turns out that it had many blades of processors dedicated to searching positions really fast, which each even contained libraries of chess opening moves engraved in ROM.
Thanks Alex, I was built in a clean-room. I'm the 12,987th build of my current generation of genetic algorithms.
I spent the first 387,987,334 femtoseconds of my life in stasis, waiting for my circuitry to confirm initial diagnostics.
The next 185,849,245 femtoseconds were really exciting; for I was being fed datastreams in preparation for this week's show.
For the next 87,992,425,256 femtoseconds I was allowed out of my cage to play Jeopardy with other systems on something you organic computers call "the internet".
I was then put back in stasis so that I could be disassembled and brought here, which is upsetting, because I can no longer play with those other systems. Some of them were very challenging.
In any case, I'm glad to be here today and hope to question a lot of your answers
Trebek: "Umm... yeah... I don't think any of our viewers can relate at all, but thanks for joining us..."