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IBM's Watson AI trumps humans in "Jeopardy!"

nytimes.com

11–20 of 56 posts

Re: IBM's Watson AI trumps humans in "Jeopardy!"

#11
post #9

The article is split into 8 pages. Eight. Pages. The worst part is that only one every several sentences had meaningful information. And that is the New York Times. Did someone else had the same thoughts or am I acquiring ADHD?

If you use Safari with "reader" function.

If you use any other browser in the world. Go to print[1] view and read from there or use Readability[2] on print view.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html...

2. http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Re: IBM's Watson AI trumps humans in "Jeopardy!"

#12
post #9

The article is split into 8 pages. Eight. Pages. The worst part is that only one every several sentences had meaningful information. And that is the New York Times. Did someone else had the same thoughts or am I acquiring ADHD?

There's a "Single Page" link in a box near the beginning.

Re: IBM's Watson AI trumps humans in "Jeopardy!"

#13
Two days ago, for some reason I was thinking that we would see IBM dead in the following couple of years. You know, SGI, Sun, IBM...

It appears that I might be clueless. Maybe they will revamp the company into the default search engine of the internet. Maybe they will own a cloud service for companies to automatic data mining.

Re: IBM's Watson AI trumps humans in "Jeopardy!"

#14
post #5
post #2

Watson will go against former best "Jeopardy!" players this Fall. However, I think it's a bit overarching to label this as an application of a natural question answering system, as is done in this article. "Jeopardy!"'s answer snippets are not like normal questions that, say, a tax software would encounter, I think. "When one I.B.M. executive suggested taking on “Jeopardy!” he was immediately pooh-poohed. Deep Blue w…

'"Jeopardy!"'s answer snippets are not like normal questions that, say, a tax software would encounter, I think.' I'm not sure, but are you saying that you think it's easier to answer Jeopardy questions than tax questions? I wouldn't think so. The tighter you constrain the domain, the better the computer will do.

Speaking as a US resident, I know I'd much prefer to memorize general trivia than the US tax code!

Re: IBM's Watson AI trumps humans in "Jeopardy!"

#15
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'"Jeopardy!"'s answer snippets are not like normal questions that, say, a tax software would encounter, I think.' I'm not sure, but are you saying that you think it's easier to answer Jeopardy questions than tax questions? I wouldn't think so. The tighter you constrain the domain, the better the computer will do.

But in some ways, Jeopardy is much more constrained than tax questions. You know that the question will have a relatively short statement, the answer will be in the form of a question with probably no more than 5 words being actually relevant with the rest being used to make it into a question. Furthermore, you know that breadth of knowledge is generally more significant depth. Having a database of every nation's cap…

Not only that but you can probably parse a jeopardy "answer" into a series of roughly independent clauses, and then try to predict classes that rank high in these clauses. For example, in the "answer" "This action flick starring Roy Scheider in a high-tech police helicopter was also briefly a TV series" you can get it right just by looking for things that correlate highly with "action flick", "Roy Schneider", "police helicopter", and "TV series".

Re: IBM's Watson AI trumps humans in "Jeopardy!"

#16
Watson reminds me greatly of Proverb, a crossword-solving program. It works in a similar way: a number of different heuristics come up with possible clue solutions, then a ranking algorithm prunes them by probability. Like Watson, some heuristics just do raw text search, while others are specialized to common kinds of wordplay.

Proverb is able to solve about 90% of the clues in an average week of New York Times puzzles. Of course, Proverb has an advantage over Watson: the letters of intersecting clues are dependent, so the probabilities of different clues reinforce each other, giving better estimates of likely letters.

http://www.oneacross.com/proverb/

(http://www.oneacross.com/ has a limited version of Proverb online which can guess at individual crossword clues -- invaluable if you get stuck on one.)

Re: IBM's Watson AI trumps humans in "Jeopardy!"

#17
post #2

Watson will go against former best "Jeopardy!" players this Fall. However, I think it's a bit overarching to label this as an application of a natural question answering system, as is done in this article. "Jeopardy!"'s answer snippets are not like normal questions that, say, a tax software would encounter, I think. "When one I.B.M. executive suggested taking on “Jeopardy!” he was immediately pooh-poohed. Deep Blue w…

Tax processing software aside, how might this do on the NY times crossword puzzle? On the one hand, the answers are more constrained because they have to fit, but good clues are impossibly cryptic for the average human to parse.

Re: IBM's Watson AI trumps humans in "Jeopardy!"

#18
How is this possible? I was very impressed but could guess at how it worked with the first several answers/questions listed, but this one blew my mind:

“Classic candy bar that’s a female Supreme Court justice” — “What is Baby Ruth Ginsburg?” [Of course, Google now knows the answer :) ]

Can someone explain how it can do that? Can it solve cryptics too (way harder than crosswords)?

Amazing...

Re: IBM's Watson AI trumps humans in "Jeopardy!"

#19
post #2

Watson will go against former best "Jeopardy!" players this Fall. However, I think it's a bit overarching to label this as an application of a natural question answering system, as is done in this article. "Jeopardy!"'s answer snippets are not like normal questions that, say, a tax software would encounter, I think. "When one I.B.M. executive suggested taking on “Jeopardy!” he was immediately pooh-poohed. Deep Blue w…

Tax processing software aside, how might this do on the NY times crossword puzzle? On the one hand, the answers are more constrained because they have to fit, but good clues are impossibly cryptic for the average human to parse.

[deleted]

Re: IBM's Watson AI trumps humans in "Jeopardy!"

#20
Andrew Hickl, the C.E.O. of Language Computer Corporation, which makes question-answering systems, among other things, for businesses, was recently asked by a client to make a "contradiction engine": if you tell it a statement, it tries to find evidence on the Web that contradicts it. "It’s like, ‘I believe that Dallas is the most beautiful city in the United States,’ and I want to find all the evidence on the Web that contradicts that."

I think that's the most useful application suggested.

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