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Watch IBM's Watson On Jeopardy Tonight
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.
JohnMurtari notes that the media hype machines are massively promoting tonight's battle between Jeopardy champions and a super computer.
I'm so glad we're above that.
Seriously, if this thing doesn't accidentally observe the Higgs Boson while seeking for a question to an answer, I'm going to be disappointed.
My work here is dung.
I mean its going to be one of the first times that a robot with speech recognition will be live and responding against people in real time on broadcast TV. I think you all have been living in your movie plots too much to realize how big of a moment this actually is.
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).
Yes, they are hyping it for more than it's worth, but there's one thing here worth hyping: the fact that IBM still runs a state-of-the-art computer science research program. Just about every other corporation has gutted whatever research institute they had and concentrated their R&D funds on directly marketable products. IBM still runs the Watson research center that develops ideas from basic computer science down to products, even if it takes more than a decade to do it and the results are not certain. That is certainly worth respect.
True, but it's also an understanding of human language. If you watch the PBS NOVA episode on it, it can be quite hard. Like the category called "Days in months", where you're given two days of a month and have to answer in the month. How does a computer figure that out? (In Watson's case, it didn't until it saw the correct answers and figured out that it needed to be months).
Or a category like "before and after"?
Pure trivia questions - yes it's a simple database lookup (and Watson basically kills at it). But Jeopardy isn't just a nerd trivia game, it's all about subtleties of language - double meanings, puns, wordplay and other elements that make it extremely hard.
It's basically a step towards understanding natural language, with all the issues and subtleties that we put in - emotions, sarcasm, etc.
Or, in Feb 14-16, 2011, Skynet will show off its ability to understand human language.
>> While obviously it does utilize data storage, lookup, and statistical probabilities to help find
>> and choose an answer, it also significantly relies on machine learning [wikipedia.org] (a large branch of AI)
>> to understand the questions and choose the answers.
If this machine chooses the Answers it will lose at Jeopardy, It needs to determine the Questions . . .
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
The ability to follow a rigid set of very specific instructions that someone else has established is not intelligence.
"But this one goes to 11!"
The show that will air tonight has been filmed weeks ago, for no good reason that I can think of. They would definitely stir up more attention and attract more viewers if the show was broadcast live. This is like being told months after the fact that Deep Blue did in fact beat Kasparov, and the moves were 1. Kp3, ... That would have been completely lame.
What IBM hopes for is for Watson to win, but not win by much, so that people aren't put off by its brutality. And this taping of the show weeks ahead of the airing just invites speculation that the game was rigged to produce exactly this result. After investing so many resources in Watson, it's pretty dumb of IBM to not do this last thing right - which would have greatly raised the interest without any additional cost. One imagines that they did this because of their lack of confidence in Watson's performance. And that makes them look far less badass than they otherwise would.
You have got to be kidding right? Any reading about Watson will quickly reveal that the subtleties of language (specifically English metaphors, similes, and irony) as well as the ingrained underpinnings of Western culture have been its two biggest obstacles since day one, and that's precisely why IBM chose Jeopardy as their next grand AI challenge.
Having dozens of Chinese colleagues, I can assure you that the hidden meanings and references we bury in the English language are completely lost to them even though they know the English words. Do you really think I will understand their jokes, movies, books, etc, just because I flipped a switch and heard a word-for-word translation from Chinese to English? (Even that situation is absurd, actually, because Chinese-English translators have to see a sentence and translate holistically, where many colloquialisms and phrases lose their meaning in translation)
Here's a quick example:
(Exact translation from Chinese to English) "Watchful caution! Avatar come!"
If you thought that meant a blue creature or a virtual representation of a person was coming for you, you'd be wrong. Chinese gamers call a bombing helicopter/hovercraft an "Avatar," because they first saw one in the movie Avatar. If Watson got that right, he'd have to know a very subtle fact about Chinese culture, and Jeopardy is replete with these cultural landmines.
If IBM can prove a machine understands the deep underpinnings of our language AND culture by correctly answering very apocryphal questions better than a Jeopardy champion, then the company will have effectively demonstrated the world's best language and cultural interpreter to bridge the gap between man and machine.
AccountKiller
It'll be even more impressive in 10 years when the same type of power is in my phone.
Your phone will not have terabytes of RAM in ten years. I promise.
The actual phone may not have 10 terabytes of RAM, but I bet it will be able to instantly access computers that do.
In fact, with Google, Bing, and other search engines, one could make a case that your phone already does contain at least that amount of RAM.
We are also seeing this with services like OnLive. Once we get to a point with mobile phones that have very high bandwidth, very low latency and access to dedicated, powerfull remote computers, everything is going to go to dumb terminal renderers.
"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
"What would be a good definition artificial intelligence that wouldn't be subject to goalpost moving?"
When the AI starts chiming in on where the goalpoast is, and giving us suggestions, I think then we can hang our hats and go home as a dying species.
You have to understand the semantic meaning of an error in computing. An error is something that is generated by an implementation upon the failure of a test at some level of the system -- it indicates the system has entered a state where further inputs will no longer map to the "desired" outputs. The issue is in how we define "desired," and we find that this is always defined semantically by the humans designing the system, a priori. A computer cannot divide a number by zero, or dereference a null pointer, because we say so, because we apply that abstract truth to the system. We do so because hardware and software form an entity that requires internal consistency to respond to inputs, and when that internal consistency is lost the system no longer is useable.
Humans make errors all the time, it's just that we do not generally halt when we make them. We have other ways of reconciling errors, things we call "rationalization" or "denial" or "learning." Human beings have very limited a priori desired outputs and exception states, and none of them apply to symbolic reasoning -- a coma might be an example of an exception state, and it's brought about by "recoverable device failures." The human brain and cognitive system is also much more finely engineered and rigorous than a computer system, inputs and outputs are always "sane," the states of the system, such as they are, are highly distributed in time and between functional units, and on most levels of operation the global system cannot lose internal consistency in a way that jeopardizes operation.
Well, the Nova ScienceNow that directly preceded the Watson episode was all about animal cognition (probably not coincidentally), and they had several rather unsettling demonstrations of a dog that could remember dozens of toys by name, and collect novel toys given nothing but the novel toy's name; a parrot that could count to eight and construct declarative phrases of nouns and modifiers; and dolphins with functional vocabularies that were provably communicating with each other through their squeaks to collaborate on a trick that they invented themselves.
Most creature's brains are capable of abstraction to a degree, but the physical attributes that are associated with humanity, like the opposable thumb, bipedal walking, and particularly a voice, have the effect of creating enormous selection pressures upon the brain. A hand grabbing a pole can kill one animal a year or a hundred, depending on how smart the brain behind it wields it. It may take one individual one lifetime to teach one other individual how to make a tool, or in the same time teach ten-thousand, completely depending on how well they use speech. Because birds and dolphins and dogs can't really manipulate their environment to the degree a creature with a hand can, the selection pressures fall upon other parts of their physiognomy.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
At IBM "Lotusphere" event, the closing general session was a preview match. It was done as close the the same was as an actual jeopardy show but with contestants picked from a small mini-tournament of attendees, and a comedian as host instead of Alex T.
Having been present at this (and getting my picture taken next to the Watson "icon/screen") and then watching the Nova episode, I can say for sure that the Nova show was a very well done description of what happens; as well as Watson's strengths and weaknesses.
I'm not sure if they'll show it on the live TV show taping, but in the run through we saw, they showed Watson's top 3 picks with a level of confidence on each. It was as interesting to see the second and third choices as it was to see what it actually came up with for an answer.
A couple of things were updated from when they must have taped the Nova show. First, Watson was far more strategic when it came time to place bets than it had been shown on Nova. Second, it was far better at understanding weird language in the categories.
I'm looking forward to the show.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
It's striking how many people are willing to die for things they don't understand, let alone converse about them.
I was struck in Wired for War by the stories of EOD units in Iraq who would name their bomb-defusing robots, give them ranks, promotions, and ribbons, and, touchingly, would mourn their robot's destruction. There's one story about an operator who was literally bawling to a support rep at iRobot, asking if they could please somehow repair their bot. They were real creatures to them, and they were completely unintelligent. What really made the robots alive to them is that they were balky, seemed to have a personality in difficult situations (operator's confirmation bias at work), and had saved the operator's lives many, many times. It didn't matter that the robot didn't "understand" why it was being destroyed, the operators were often in a similar situation... what mattered was its (nominal) selflessness and heroism, something the operator's were required to display as well in a war situation.
I mean like, the Chinese Room is interesting, but the dark secret is that, when it comes to the way human beings confer personhood on other things, it makes it so there is no door to the Chinese Room. Only a mail slot, and it's impossible to see what's on the other side. An an unknowable truth is no truth at all.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.