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Watch IBM's Watson On Jeopardy Tonight

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the yeah-i-think-i'll-pass dept.

JohnMurtari notes that the media hype machines are massively promoting tonight's battle between Jeopardy champions and a super computer. Yes it's a PR stunt. But I imagine the actual research probably had a lot of interesting problems to address. Anyway, you can learn about IBM Watson if you're interested. I'm sure the most amusing bits will be on YouTube about 30 seconds after air time.

5 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not sure why people are knocking it by maxume · · Score: 5, Informative

    It does not use speech recognition, it receives the 'answers' as text.

    --
    Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  2. NOVA's documentary by antdude · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622/ for Americans. :)

    --
    Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
  3. Re:Publicity fumble: Why not do it live? by Lev13than · · Score: 4, Informative

    The show that will air tonight has been filmed weeks ago, for no good reason that I can think of.

    Jeopardy is always filmed in advance. There's no conspiracy - it's much cheaper to film a daily game show in batches. Editing/preparing the episodes also takes a bit of time, hence the delay

    --
    When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
  4. Re:Yes, Thank Turing We're Not the Media Hype Mach by Ambvai · · Score: 3, Informative

    "This man was the son of a president, a president himself, and invaded the same country as his father."

    I'm feeling lucky...!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Bush

  5. So? by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2, Informative

    So long as computers continue to be built as they are, they will never be anything but numerical manipulation. At their fundamental level, that is all they do. They manipulate numbers in various ways. At the fundamental level there is just binary data, without type or form. In memory the data isn't even characters or pixels or any of that, just a long string of binary digits. It is only given form by the programs that are written to use it.

    However that doesn't mean that the behaviour at the higher level will not emerge to be like that of humans to be able to understand, as in correctly parse and work with, human speech and concepts.

    After all at a fundamental level humans are just neurons making electrical and chemical signals. When you get down and look at a single neuron and how it functions in the brain it gives no clues that an intelligence might emerge from it.

    So in the end, computers will always just manipulate numbers, unless we change how we build processors. That doesn't mean that their numerical calculation may not give rise to something that can accurately be called "intelligence".