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IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

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Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#61

Post by teraflop »

ero5004 wrote: post #17

Won'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.

I wouldn't bet on it. In the "preview" round, Watson seemed to come up with its answers more or less instantaneously. (Or at least, before the host finished reading the question.) My guess is the limiting factor is the quality of the underlying dataset and cleverness of the algorithms, not CPU time.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#64

Post by jonhohle »

meterplech wrote: post #39
acangiano wrote: post #3

This 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…

I love seeing this type of response. It's similar to the race to put a man on the moon. Some technology should be there to inspire.

Not just inspire, but push the envelope. The fallout of traveling to space not only unified the country but provided new technologies which simply had no need to be created until something as epic as landing on an orbiting satellite was attempted. These actions pay dividends unrelated to the mission at hand.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#65

Post by baddox »

acangiano wrote: post #3

This 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…

Watson's defeat of top Jeopardy! players, while an impressive feat of natural language processing, is not as impressive as a defeat of a grand master, for one reason.

The reason is that when multiple contestants know the correct response in Jeopardy!, it all comes down to reflexive timing. It's no surprise that a computer could buzz in faster than a human being, and there's no evidence that Watson knows more correct responses than the human competitors.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#66

Post by losvedir »

ugh wrote: post #13
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #4

Earlier 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 actually answer Jeopardy questions.

I think you mean, it can actually question Jeopardy answers.

Sigh... I always hated that about the show.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#67

Post by baddox »

cryptoz wrote: post #2

Humanity 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…

The thing is, Jeopardy! at a high level of competition boils down to reflexes. Obviously it's very impressive that Watson would even be able to generate correct responses a significant portion of the time, but you must realize that the two human contestants probably knew more correct responses that Watson. In the practice video, you saw Ken take off on the book titles category, probably because Watson couldn't handle the language of those clues.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#68

Post by natural219 »

arethuza wrote: post #38
kls wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No disrespect intended but, I think you are lacking a fundamental understanding of machine learning, genetic algorithms, neural networks and AI in general. I was introduced to Watson when I took a sub-project from IBM related to Watson, I had no idea what it was untill taking the contract, at which point I was introduced to Watson and it is an impressive feat, it is with out a doubt the state of the art in NLP AI. Su…

I think anyone who has worked in the field of AI would admit there are a lot of philosophical questions around the definition of intelligence and it's relationship to algorithmic problem solving. One of my favourite thought experiments in the area being Searle's Chinese Room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

How is this anything but pure semantics? I still don't know the conceptual difference between Searle's strong AI and weak AI, other a single word change in the definition.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#69

Post by [deleted] »

baddox wrote: post #65
acangiano wrote: post #3

This 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…

Watson's defeat of top Jeopardy! players, while an impressive feat of natural language processing, is not as impressive as a defeat of a grand master, for one reason. The reason is that when multiple contestants know the correct response in Jeopardy!, it all comes down to reflexive timing. It's no surprise that a computer could buzz in faster than a human being, and there's no evidence that Watson knows more correct…

[deleted]

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#70

Post by ugh »

losvedir wrote: post #66
ugh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actually answer Jeopardy questions. I think you mean, it can actually question Jeopardy answers. Sigh... I always hated that about the show.

That sounds like a fun diversion!

No, I most definitely mean that it can actually answer Jeopardy questions. Formulating sentences oddly doesn't turn questions into answers and answers into questions. You could define "question" and "answer" as sentences with a certain syntax but that would be an extremely stupid definition.

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