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."

Comments

Wrong answers

[Lev13than]

I thought the wrong/skipped answers were much more illuminating than the right answers.

For example, much has been made of Watson's "Toronto" answer to the US Cities question in Game 1. However, it wasn't a terrible answer because one of Toronto's airports is named after a war hero (Billy Bishop, the WWI fighter ace who shot down the Red Baron), and the main airport (Pearson) was named after a politician who was also a WWI veteran. Watson knew that Toronto wasn't in the US, the war was wrong and neither were named after a battle, but Toronto was the least wrong of all its options so that's what it chose. If this question had come up in the regular rounds Watson would have skipped (as happened occasionally). However, it needed to answer so it went with the best available option.

Now, since Watson would certainly have had data on O'Hare, Midway and Chicago in its database, the problem was either in the question parsing or the search heuristics. One suspects that its weakness is the linking together of disparate data, and it's quite likely that humans will retain this edge for some time.