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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."
Does Ken Jennings read Slashdot comments?
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.
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.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
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"?