Jump to content
Washington Football Team Logo
Extremeskins
Forum Rules and Guidelines

The Return of the King: Ken Jennings back on Jeopardy to face a computer

skinfan2k

By skinfan2k
in The Tailgate

Recommended Posts

Hubbs

Hubbs

Posted
Posted
That was a little surprising at first.. that they couldn't build in some kind of instant learning mechanism for competitors' wrong answers. But thinking of the logistics of that, I'm not sure how they could have done it. Maybe in Watson,Jr.

My phone can recognize words I speak and turn them into text messages. You'd think they'd at least have equipped that much technology, with the ability to immediately cross-reference the recognized words with potential answers, into Watson.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
TheGoodBits

TheGoodBits

Posted
Posted
My phone can recognize words I speak and turn them into text messages. You'd think they'd at least have equipped that much technology, with the ability to immediately cross-reference the recognized words with potential answers, into Watson.

Yeah that was a little surprising. All that work on it and you don't equip it with voice recognition? Even the questions are delivered to it in text form, so it has no ability to take Jennings' wrong answer and eliminate it from its possible answers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Dan T.

Dan T.

Posted
Posted
My phone can recognize words I speak and turn them into text messages. You'd think they'd at least have equipped that much technology, with the ability to immediately cross-reference the recognized words with potential answers, into Watson.
Yeah that was a little surprising. All that work on it and you don't equip it with voice recognition? Even the questions are delivered to it in text form, so it has no ability to take Jennings' wrong answer and eliminate it from its possible answers.

So it's technically feasible, but it would be a parallel operation to the internal processing of data that Watson does. And the abilty to process instantaneous feedback like that isn't a primary need in the role the designers ultimately see for Watson's offspring.

Here's a quote from an IBM guy on it:

The first night was a huge learning experience for the engineers who've spent years working on building Watson for this very match, said Steve Canepa, IBM's general manager of global Media and the entertainment industry.

"I've seen a lot of the the videos we've put together about the making of Watson and things like that, but I hadn't actually seen it in action until tonight," Canepa said Monday after the first night of competition.

"When Watson repeated that answer, to the general public it was probably pretty funny. But Watson only takes his input from the question board so the fact that somebody else gave the same answer already doesn't factor to into Watson says. He can't hear what the other players are saying, but maybe that's a feature we can add in the future."

Offering the same response as Jennings also shows just how smart Watson is, he said.

"There is obviously some form of logic that was very similar to that of the human player tackling that problem, and that is fascinating to me," Canepa said. "The ability to sort through what is a couple hundred million pages of information in a very short amount of time, all the data that we create in blogs and tweets and articles and all of that unstructured text on the Internet -- to be able to find the relationship between words so quickly is what the point of all this is."

All the data stored in Watson is acquired from the Internet, as well as books and journals, though for competition, Watson is disconnected from the Web, he said.

IBM is looking to change the way computers, and people, search and learn using computers, Canepa said, and Watson is searching information as humans create it, not just by data put into rows and columns as has been done before.

"We'll see what happens over the next two nights, but I'm not overly focused on the win or loss myself," he said. "In Chess, as finite as it is, there's a finite number of moves. But in this there are an infinite number of questions that can be asked and with all the puns and ways there are to ask a question.

"I'm really focused on the many real-life situations for this ability to be able to dive into unstructured data and make sense of it. The kind of search we do on a search engine today is much more keyword oriented and this is way beyond that ... If we can search with intelligence, it could open up all sorts of new fields and possibilities."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/02/ibms-watson-on-jeopardy-round-1-ends-in-a-tie.html

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Dan T.

Dan T.

Posted
Posted

Someone said that the longer the clue, the better Watson did, presumably because of the extra second or two of processing time. Did anybody else notice that?

Also, Watson seemed to have trouble with the word play of the Alternate Meanings category - he/it answered "What is chic?" to the clue “Stylish elegance, or students who all graduated in the same year.” The correct response was "What is class?" To me, the wrong answers were more interesting than the correct ones.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
jnhay

jnhay

Posted
Posted
Wow watson rings in at the absolute best time and never gets locked out of a clue. Ken and Brad are getting annoyed. It is a slaughter.

That's not really fair. I guess that's part of the whole point, but of course a computer will be able to buzz in quicker.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
mikered30

mikered30

Posted
Posted

I noticed that watson's 2nd and 3rd choices are not even close to his first answer as far as how they are related on some of the questions. I wonder how Watson figures out how much to bet? The totals from tonight get added to the totals from tomorrow for a chance for the 1 million dollars.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Mooka

Mooka

Posted
Posted
It seems like Watson is awarded the tie every time when they're ringing in. It's kind of BS, because the other guys know most of these answers as well and are ringing in at the same time.
hmm.

So Jennings is getting a taste of his own medicine then?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Dan T.

Dan T.

Posted
Posted

The IBM guys were saying Watson could revolutionize the practice of medicine. I can see it now:

ATTENDING DR: Dr. Barnard, the patient is bleeding out. Should we perform endovascular, open, or conventional

vascular surgery on this aortic aneurysm? We must ask Watson - STAT.

WATSON: Beepboopbeep. What is Toronto?

Watson Project Director David Ferrucci weighs in on the What is Toronto hiccup. Decent explanation:

http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2011/02/watson-on-jeopardy-day-two-the-confusion-over-an-airport-clue.html

(In additon to being really really smart, Ferrucci's got a good sense of humor - he wore a Toronto Blue Jays ball cap to the next day's taping!)

---------- Post added February-15th-2011 at 10:44 PM ----------

It seems like Watson is awarded the tie every time when they're ringing in. It's kind of BS, because the other guys know most of these answers as well and are ringing in at the same time.

Not really. Here's a good explanation of how the buzzing in on Jeopardy works, and how the process is adapted for Watson:

http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-watson-sees-hears-and-speaks-to.html

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Burgold

Burgold

Posted
Posted

Yeah, I think the response time is the problem. The human brain is fast enough, but by the time they click the signal and then the signal sends a message to be received it's too slow. It's actually unfair since Watson's response is direct whereas the humans have to go through a second medium. What might be interesting is a challenge in which all get to answer and the guy with the most correct answers wins.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Dan T.

Dan T.

Posted
Posted
Yeah, I think the response time is the problem. The human brain is fast enough, but by the time they click the signal and then the signal sends a message to be received it's too slow. It's actually unfair since Watson's response is direct whereas the humans have to go through a second medium. What might be interesting is a challenge in which all get to answer and the guy with the most correct answers wins.

Click the second link in my post just above yours.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Spec138

Spec138

Posted
Posted
Yeah that was a little surprising. All that work on it and you don't equip it with voice recognition? Even the questions are delivered to it in text form, so it has no ability to take Jennings' wrong answer and eliminate it from its possible answers.

Just reading the thread and watching the episodes on youtube. I think the reason they didn't do this is because while Jeopardy! is a great PR stunt for IBM, this system wasn't really built for the purpose of playing the game. As said before even a cell phone could eliminate wrong answers and transform the questions to text so I doubt it was a big concern of the engineers.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...