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IBM's Jeopardy Strategy
jfruhlinger writes "Developing a computer that could play chess once seemed like a worthy AI goal — but it turned out to be something of a dead end, as chess is very abstract and simple when compared to the real world. Will creating a game-show-playing computer lead to more interesting results? IBM hopes so, and its Watson machine will tackle problems in parallel processing, data searching, and natural language comprehension in an attempt to beat Jeopardy legends Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. " IBM announced the man vs. machine competition last month.
It's not dumping money into R&D. It's dumping money into marketing.
Human Language Processing is still a weak point in getting computers to do what film computers do.
If you can get a computer to understand what you mean, then it'd change UIs forever.
It does sound weird, but it simply boils down to this: chess is a lot easier for computers than it is for humans and Jeopardy is a lot easier for humans than it is for computers.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Unlike winning at chess, which has little if any real world possibilities (except allowing solitary chase playing for the grand masters). Answering jeopardy style vague questions is at the heart of many help desk applications, searching, and even reception work. This is a real product/service that can be sold.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
If you can get a computer to understand what you mean, then it'd change UIs forever.
Per the article, a single processor would take 3 hours to process each Jeopardy answer. That would certainly qualify as "forever" in the context of a user interface.
And since computers don't go faster, it'll be like that forever.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
The help desk is a lot like Jeopardy too, in that the answer is often given in the form of a question. e.g. "Is the computer plugged in?"
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