A lot of geeks' girlfriends are going to be disappointed on 14th (aka Valentine's Day, in case you're wondering ;) ), as they huddle around a TV like schoolgirls watching a Bieber concert.
IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy
11–20 of 148 posts
Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior. We have no more to fear from it, than from a punch and judy show. Cleverer and cleverer puppets will not become intelligent machines. A dedicated effort to build a massive neural cluster simulation might become intelligent, but it will think such incomprehensible thoughts as to be fairly useless to us (think intelligent rhododendon; what would…
Watson is not a simulation any more than your brain is a simulation. Your brain is ( likely ) mostly just algorithms and data structures, albeit on an enormous scale. This could be wrong, but I'm betting not. What else could the brain possibly be? It's not magic. > We will know when Watson is dangerous when it feels fear, angst, want. Not just an algorithm to sort facts and simulate speech. Nah. Look at good science…
I deny that the human brain IS algorithms. It is neurons connected by dendrons/synapses. Right?
Small bits of it can be algorithmically simulated. Large processes can be algorithmically simulated. But to call the algorithm "intelligence" is sympathetic magic.
Algorithms work in a different way; they break in a different way; they are hard-coded so don't change. They are a simulation.
Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy
#13Humanity is closing in on building machines to pass the Turing Test. Watson beat both champs in the demo round a few weeks ago and I fully expect him - yes, him - to beat them in the match coming up. I can't wait to watch this live. What an epic moment in the process of moving slowly from weak AI -> strong AI. Watson can do amazing NLP (and presumably Machine Learning), which is something that the general public perc…
Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior. We have no more to fear from it, than from a punch and judy show. Cleverer and cleverer puppets will not become intelligent machines. A dedicated effort to build a massive neural cluster simulation might become intelligent, but it will think such incomprehensible thoughts as to be fairly useless to us (think intelligent rhododendon; what would…
A simulation of what?
It can actually answer Jeopardy questions. As good or better than the best Jeopardy player on the planet. (We will see.) Another task, previously only conquered by evolution, now conquered by algorithms written by humans. Watson doesn’t pretend to be good at Jeopardy, it just is.
Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy
#14This is going to be, for lack of better words, epic. On a personal level however, it's a reminder of how truly wondrous the future is. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov I was a kid in an Italian high school, trying to explain to disinterested fellow students why that was a big deal. Not even in my wildest dreams I would have imagined to be working for the company that made that and this event possible, in a different coun…
Reminds me of this Brad Paisley video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Yg9wjctRw&feature=relat...
Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy
#15> Watson is comprised of 90 Power 750 servers, 16 TB of memory and 4 TB of disk storage 4TB disk? something is wrong here.
Perhaps they meant 360TB, 4TB per machine?
Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior. We have no more to fear from it, than from a punch and judy show. Cleverer and cleverer puppets will not become intelligent machines. A dedicated effort to build a massive neural cluster simulation might become intelligent, but it will think such incomprehensible thoughts as to be fairly useless to us (think intelligent rhododendon; what would…
A simulation of what? It can actually answer Jeopardy questions. As good or better than the best Jeopardy player on the planet. (We will see.) Another task, previously only conquered by evolution, now conquered by algorithms written by humans. Watson doesn’t pretend to be good at Jeopardy, it just is.
It can simulate an intelligence answering Jeopardy questions.
Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy
#17Won't Watson have a significant advantage on the final Jeopardy question where time is not nearly as much of a factor? If it can just keep pace for most of the game and then bet it all on that last question, it should be no contest.
Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior. We have no more to fear from it, than from a punch and judy show. Cleverer and cleverer puppets will not become intelligent machines. A dedicated effort to build a massive neural cluster simulation might become intelligent, but it will think such incomprehensible thoughts as to be fairly useless to us (think intelligent rhododendon; what would…
A simulation of what? It can actually answer Jeopardy questions. As good or better than the best Jeopardy player on the planet. (We will see.) Another task, previously only conquered by evolution, now conquered by algorithms written by humans. Watson doesn’t pretend to be good at Jeopardy, it just is.
> Another task, previously only conquered by evolution
I'm pretty sure that Jeopardy performance as such has not been strongly selected for among the ancestors of present day H. sapiens.
(And the related things that may have been -- effective language use, good memory, etc. -- are not so obviously "conquered by algorithms written by humans" however well Watson does.)
Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy
#19I am intrigued by Watson. NLP is definitely something that has failed to live up to its billing so far. I will be very interested to see what kinds of questions Watson is good at and which he tends to miss, to see if there are any patterns there.
Going forward, the other real questions will be: is Watson overfitted to the problem of solving Jeopardy questions, and how practical is the technology? The former is a real risk to the general applicability of Watson's technologies, the latter is a question of who can afford it. The article mentioned on commodity hardware, Watson takes about 2 hours per clue. They only achieve reasonable response times by using about 3000 cores. That limits the potential audience.
Either way, I'm very interested to see what happens next week. I watched the demo videos on YouTube and it was quite cool.
Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy
#20There's a problem with statistical significance given that the match consists only of two games: http://www.quora.com/Does-IBM-Watson-Jeopardy-match-contribu...
I highly doubt that IBM will dismantle the machine when they're done (yes, I know that's what they did with Deep Blue, but this is different). I'd bet that far more than two games will be played with Watson, over the next few years.
Also, as pointed out in that thread, this is no different than a regular Jeopardy game. One game consists of dozens and dozens of questions. If Watson answers them all correctly and the humans get zero points, that is indeed statistically significant.
If the score is close, then repetition in games will be necessary. The problem with the assumption in that thread is that one Jeopardy game is vastly different than the next. In reality, you could string together a bunch of games and call it one game. Or take one game and split it up into 50 "games". The point is, inside one game, there are enough different questions to definitely count as statistically significant.