IBM's Jeopardy Strategy

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Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday January 5, 2011 @08:37AM from the john-henry dept.

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.

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Meh... by Haedrian · 2011-01-05 08:40 · Score: 2

Once upon a time, a computer beating an expert at chess was amazing. Controversial.
Even if they pull this off (which does happen to be a huge feat of AI if you think about it) - the general public won't care anymore. They think computers can do everything already.
1. Re:Meh... by zero.kalvin · 2011-01-05 08:49 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Obligatory XKCD : http://xkcd.com/810/ though you know, i don't think we can even start to imagine what kind of application a real capable AI can have. Just leave it to the future!
2. Re:Meh... by __aatirs3925 · 2011-01-05 08:50 · Score: 2
  
  You hit that spot-on. The general public see things from movies from 20 years ago saying that in the year 2010 we would have this and that and expect those prophecies to be fulfilled. You also get those who see things in movies or on TV like CSI where you can just 'enhance' to a godly resolution and people just don't care about these kinds of advancements. When I was learning about internet frameworks such as "web 2.0 - 4.0" one of the things mentioned was that there will be hurdles to overcome and the advancements between now and the internet 40 years from now will be substantial. Even today there is a lot of advancements such as HTML5 but the public doesn't care about that because they don't see HTML5, they see the result of it. They don't know what a CMS is and just how much work is put into them, they just see a web-page as a result and don't care what powers it. Unfortunately, this leads to people believing that there is no advancements being made on websites and in this case robots because they see ASIMO talking from a script and think that it can think on its own (although they have been recently developing self-thought with ASIMO). I hope that this Jeopardy thing will go well and people can understand just how bit of a feat this is.
3. Re:Meh... by tlhIngan · 2011-01-05 09:38 · Score: 2
  
  The computer can calculate that it has X seconds between the time it buzzes and the time it must answer. It can determine the most statistically likely correct answer it can find within X-1 seconds of "buzzing" and report that answer.
  Which doesn't mean an instant win, since it's still a difficult problem to parse the answer (which may rely on puns and other trivial), analyze the context, and formulate the question. Get the question wrong, or fail to answer in 5 seconds (the maximum time you get after buzzing) and you're penalized for it. So the machine may be able to calculate the response in 4.5 seconds always, but if the response is wrong, the machine is now worse off because of the penalty, and other players can steal those points.
  I think a demo of the game showed in the first and second rounds it dominated, then it completely screwed up in the third round to the tune of -18,000-ish (I can't remember if it also squandered its lead, so it would meant it got almost every question wrong).
  Once we perfect natural language parsing and the knowledge base we may have something. But still those things are a long way away.
  And players are known to buzz in before the answer is completely read, anticipating the rest of the answer.
4. Re:Meh... by johanatan · 2011-01-05 10:31 · Score: 2
  
  I don't believe anyone was suggesting blindly buzzing in but rather calculating that you can calculate or finish calculating the correct question in 5 secs or less (to a high degree of confidence). A highly-parallel computer (read: multi-core) should be able to devote some number of threads of execution to actually calculating the answer and some other number to the calculation of the feasibility of calculating the right answer (and/or monitoring the other threads).
I can see it now by $RANDOMLUSER · 2011-01-05 08:46 · Score: 2, Funny

I'll take Patent Trolls for 100, Alex.

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Re:What is the value in this? by SheeEttin · 2011-01-05 08:50 · Score: 2, Insightful

It's not dumping money into R&D. It's dumping money into marketing.
Re:What is the value in this? by Haedrian · 2011-01-05 08:56 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.
Re:What is the value in this? by H0p313ss · 2011-01-05 08:59 · Score: 2

I'm not trolling or anything, I'm honestly really curious what the value in dumping all this money into R&D for this issue is? Will we really gain deep insights into AI that we don't already have by doing this?
Cheaper than outsourcing support to India? (And potentially more accurate?)

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Re:Once, IBM took on the mighty game of chess... by dingen · 2011-01-05 09:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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This is actually useful by gurps_npc · 2011-01-05 09:15 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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1. Re:This is actually useful by SamSim · 2011-01-05 12:06 · Score: 2
  
  And that's just considering the end result of this thing, namely Watson itself. Looking at the sheer amount of original research and work that had to be done to create it, it's unthinkable that there wouldn't be results in there that are worth spinning off and applying to other applications.
  
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Re:What is the value in this? by 14erCleaner · 2011-01-05 09:19 · Score: 2

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.

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Re:What is the value in this? by Pieroxy · 2011-01-05 09:24 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

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Re:Once, IBM took on the mighty game of chess... by Haedrian · 2011-01-05 09:24 · Score: 2

A game of chess can be represented as a tree. To find out the best possible move, traverse the tree until you reach the nearest win condition. Some heuristics, and a bunch of traversing and you can win.
Jeopardy on the other hand requires the computer to understand the question, be able to search for it, and return the correct uh... question.
Biggest Human Error: 100% bets on Daily Double by Big_Breaker · 2011-01-05 09:34 · Score: 2

Most of the time players find the daily double while running through categories they know REALLY well. Then they only bet ~$2k out of their $12k stash.
Even if they get the daily double right they will have to risk losing in final jeopardy b/c they haven't doubled the second place player's score. The smart play is to "make it a true daily double" and lap your opponents on a category you know well. Daily double questions are no harder than final jeopardy and I generally find them much easier. That's the time to risk it all. You not only increase your probability of winning but also your cash winnings.
Imagine you are up 80% on your opponent and the final jeopardy category comes up as something you know NOTHING about. That's the time when you wish you bet more on that daily double.
Re:Once, IBM took on the mighty game of chess... by Hatta · 2011-01-05 10:06 · Score: 3, Insightful

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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Time for a new category... by infernalC · 2011-01-05 11:30 · Score: 4, Funny

Jennings: I'll take CAPTCHAs for 1000, Alex...
Big Blue: Damnit.