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Watson Wins Jeopardy Contest
NicknamesAreStupid writes "The word is in, Watson beats the two best Jeopardy players. Sure, it cost IBM four years and millions of dollars and requires a room full of hardware. In thirty years it will all fit in your pocket and cost $19.99. Resistance is futile; you will be trivialized."
Correction: competitors must perform voice recognition or OCR to process the clues. The clues are displayed and read, and the contestants are free to ignore either form, if they wish. Similarly, Watson could have had a camera trained on the monitor and performed OCR on the clue. But, given that OCR has been done brilliantly by computers for years now, would adding that into the mix have made much difference at all?
Regarding ringing in, the contestants also get a signal indicating when they can do it, but it's visual. It would have been easy enough to add another camera trained on the light, but why bother?
The engineers involved were trying to solve the interesting problems. Delivering input to each contestant in the most convenient form doesn't seem like much of a concession.
Actually, you are wrong about the buzz in. It gives the humans an advantage. The reason is that Watson has a mechanical buzzer that it presses. So the only advantage would come from reacting faster. However, the rules state that you can buzz in only after the host has finished reading the clue. If you buzz in earlier then you are penalized by .25sec.
Watson has a computer clock. It never buzzes in early, and it never suffers the .25sec penalty. The humans did suffer this penalty on several occasions.
It's ridiculous beyond belief to claim that the humans had the advantage in buzzing in.
Who cares, if Watson's artificial reflexes gave it a few milliseconds' advantage on the buzzer? Who even cares if it'd take it a second longer to read the clue via OCR? So what if Watson would be 5% faster or 10% slower, if conditions were slightly different? Moore's Law makes that level of difference utterly irrelevant - in 18 months time, Watson will be *100% faster* (or even today, if IBM just threw more hardware at it).
Deep Blue vs Kasparov was fascinating at the time, but is uninteresting now for the same reason. A decent desktop PC can play at that level. And comparing human vs machine play styles is also largely pointless, in the same way that comparing birds and jets is pointless.
The important part, by far, is that Watson parsed the questions, linked the clues and searched for statistically relevant answers in a human-like time. The amazing fact is, it can actually do it *at all*. Now that today's systems can do this sort of language parsing and information retrieval in a "reasonable" time, it will be increasingly trivial for tomorrow's. It is now all but inevitable that we will have Watson-like systems available to the public, in numerous fields, in corporations and on the web, in your PCs and even your game consoles, in a brief handful of years.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If he is a slashdot user then he reads the comments, but certainly not TFA. Given his Jeopardy record, It is apparent that he DOES in fact RTFA. Therefore, I concur with 90% confidence that Ken Jennings is not a slashdot reader.