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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.
It does not use speech recognition, it receives the 'answers' as text.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I tried to explain to the wife how amazing it is. She isn't technology illiterate, in fact I'd say she's well above average, but she just didn't see what was so impressive about it. People don't understand that there is an enormous gap between being able to retrieve general information on a subject and being able to answer a specific question. In their minds computers have been doing 99% of this for a good decade now; closing the last 1%, even if it is arguable the hardest percent, just isn't that cool to anyone outside of CS.
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
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.
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