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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

#101

Post by baddox »

kenjackson wrote: post #75
baddox wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But you still give Watson too little credit here. You have typically 3s from when the "answer" is shown to when you can click the buzzer. So in 3s Watson has to go through all of its databases and semantic links and formulate the question, from an answer that often doesn't even make sense to probably half of the US population. That's pretty impressive.

I understand and appreciate what Watson is doing. It's awesome and ground-breaking. However, with contestants of this skill level, most of the responses will be known by all contestants, and the real competition is how fast you can buzz in after the light turns on indicating the clue has been completed.

Think of it this way: if you had a human standing in Watson's spot, with a monitor displaying Watson's suggested response, I don't think that human would perform as well against the other human contestants. Sure, Watson would often come up with the correct response while the clue was being spoken by the host, but the human would still have to buzz in when the light turns on. If you buzz in too early, you get locked out for something like a quarter of a second. Watson would still be extremely awesome technology, but I don't think a human with access to Watson's output would compete at anywhere near the level that Watson did in the video.

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

#102

Post by baddox »

DonnyV wrote: post #73
baddox wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think you fully understand what is going on here. Watson will Process the slang in the sentence, figure out how the words are being used, understand the context of the question and then look through its internal databases to see if it can piece different pieces of knowledge that it has to come up with an answer. THATS FUCKING HUGE!!!

What led you to believe that I don't understand what's going on? I definitely understand and appreciate IBM's accomplishment. I'm not minimizing the coolness of Watson being able to come up with so many correct responses, I'm minimizing the importance of its actual Jeopardy! gameplay. I'm not sure you understand the real game mechanics of Jeopardy! With highly proficient contestants, it comes down to being able to buzz in as soon as the light turns on indicating that the clue has been delivered by the host. All three contestants know the correct responses to most clues, and it really does come down to the buzzer reflexes, something Watson clearly has a huge advantage in.

Again, I fully understand and appreciate what an advance in natural language processing and sheer computation Watson represents. Even being able to match a below-average human Jeopardy! contestant would be impressive. However, the true game-winning technique in Jeopardy! (when all three contestants are highly skilled) is buzzer reflexes.

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

#103

Post by blauwbilgorgel »

demallien wrote: post #97
blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He does understand. The Turing test is to answer if machines can feign human intelligence. To pass a Turing test, feigning (not necessarily possessing) intelligence is enough. The answer to insight into a system's qualia is not a Turing test: Watson, tell us, do you feel fear? Crunching through some look-up tables Yes! What did that prove about Watson feeling fear or not? We could have Alice talking with Watson for h…

Ugh. No, I repeat, the Turing Test is not about intelligence - it's about whether or not the entity in question can think . Please, read the link I posted, it's all in there. Also, where on Earth do I equate feigning intelligence with possessing intelligence. You're just making that up.

I had to read the original paper in the first week of college, so my knowledge may be a little rusty, but wasn't the paper titled: Computing Machinery and Intelligence?

I'm sure the question was asked: Can machines think? But passing the Turing Test doesn't answer this question. It answers a different question: What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game? Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman?

Its up to you if you take an affirmative answer to those questions to also answer the question it replaces: "Can machines think?" The imitation game does not aim to proof anything to this point. It aims to support its replacement questions, which we have to take at face value: that imitation is just as good (for all sense and purposes) as the real thing.

Also, you write: >And how will we know that Watson actually feels fear? The answer to this type of conundrum is simple and well-known: a Turing test.

If I make a chatscript that tricks you into thinking it was a person feeling fear, by your own logic, you would deem that chatscript to be thinking and actually capable of intelligent conversation, even if you were told afterward it was just some lines of code, feigning you with a (if input, output: yes), it still passed the test, so your answer is: those binary bits must feel fear (or you agree that you apply the Turing Test where it makes no sense).

What entities are really feeling and how to communicate this, has no simple known answer. There have been century-old debates about Qualia. The answer certainly isn't an imitation game, if you insist it is, you are equating feigning with truly possessing. (Or you are suggesting I am a P-zombie and I take offense to that!)

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

#104

Post by Dn_Ab »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #82
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…

Arguing that consciousness and the brain is different from deterministic algorithms, or neural networks is perfectly valid. It doesn't show lack of understanding of AI. Just that the debater is not an adherer of strong AI functionalism. Using Gödel's incompleteness theorems one can argue that no set of algorithms is capable of perfectly modeling human consciousness. A logically correct algorithm can not give faulty o…

How is Godel's incompleteness theorems an issue here? AI does not have to model the human brain by simulating it. And it need not be rigorously/axiomatically defined as a decidable formal system nor does it need the ability to prove its own consistency. Nor does it need to be consistent, making the GITs inapplicable. Heck the AI could use paraconsistent logical reasoning or couple bayesian inference with a suitable multi-valued logic as its base.

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

#105

Post by TheCondor »

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…

Watson is completely amazing. The differences between Jeopardy and chess are staggering. I'd even say that in the chess challenge, they could kind of cheat, Deep Blue had every 5 piece board configuration in a book and so if it could play to 5 pieces left then it knew how to play from there, humans have their look up optimized differently. If this technology can be generally applied, it just seems like a radical tool, radical for medicine, law, and probably revolutionary for other professions where access to information hasn't been as important.

That being said, a really really clever jeopardy playing machine just doesn't seem "intelligent" to me. Huge bounds forward, we're making progress, I'm not denying that but Watson isn't going to slurp in the works of Shakespeare and write down some original thoughts on it, comparing it to current events. Or contrast Wordsworth and Keats. Or suggest a new experiment to further identify envelope proteins on a virus. Or invent a new way to etch semiconductors even smaller than we currently are. Will we get there? Maybe, hopefully, maybe even in our life times, but this is comprehension and search, it's not inventing or creating yet. It seems like half the problem, maybe the easier half.

Still awesome, maybe in a few years we'll have Watsons we can access from our phones or something.

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

#107

Post by jimmyk »

spot wrote: post #6

> Watson is comprised of 90 Power 750 servers, 16 TB of memory and 4 TB of disk storage 4TB disk? something is wrong here.

It's possible that it's only 4 TB. If it's only processing text and it stores a character in two bytes, that means 2 trillion characters. At a generous 8 characters per word, that's 250 billion words. There are only 560,000 words in War and Peace, which is a very long book, and 44,000,000 in the Encyclopedia Britannica, meaning you could stuff in ~500,000 of the former or ~5000 of the latter. That seems sufficient for Jeopardy.

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

#108

Post by kenjackson »

baddox wrote: post #101
kenjackson wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you still give Watson too little credit here. You have typically 3s from when the "answer" is shown to when you can click the buzzer. So in 3s Watson has to go through all of its databases and semantic links and formulate the question, from an answer that often doesn't even make sense to probably half of the US population. That's pretty impressive.

I understand and appreciate what Watson is doing. It's awesome and ground-breaking. However, with contestants of this skill level, most of the responses will be known by all contestants, and the real competition is how fast you can buzz in after the light turns on indicating the clue has been completed . Think of it this way: if you had a human standing in Watson's spot, with a monitor displaying Watson's suggested r…

with contestants of this skill level

Do you see what you're saying.. "contestants of this skill level"? It's Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and WATSON. Discussion over. The fact that there is a computer that can answer questions in 3s that put it at the level of the two greatest trivia players in history is THE story.

Some jeopardy answers:

Anagramed Animals -- A furry little pet: the rams

Some say the Bush administration's domestic spying conflicts with FISA, the Foreign Intelligence this Act

"R"2"D"2 -- More rubicund

Half the people in the US probably couldn't answer any of these at all, much less necessarily even know what the answer was referring to, period.

The fact that the computer may have an advantage at pressing the buzzer against the two best buzzer pushers of all time is a pretty small deal. IMHO. :-)

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

#109

Post by amalcon »

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…

If Deep Blue had tied Kasparov, it would still have been a tremendous achievement. I'd say the victory was only minimally more impressive.

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

#110

Post by WalterBright »

andrewce wrote: post #80
mechanical_fish wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watson is amazing, but I've known for years that it was coming. You just have to look at Google and Wikipedia to know that it was coming. Because answering trivia questions is just not the equivalent of passing the Turing test. Trivia questions are quite guessable. I played a lot of College Bowl (and its local high-school equivalent) back in my younger days. And there were many running gags about the strategy. For ex…

My college didn't have a college bowl team, but competing on high school teams and being responsible for more than a few correct two or three word answers, I can vouch for this. It's all about having enough breadth that the other bits of information presented can help whittle down answers by way of association and relationships. Good trivia players rely quite a bit on intuition. Ken Jennings mentioned (in his book) h…

I had the same thought. I think Watson would make a fabulous resource for medical diagnoses. It also shouldn't just give the "answer", but the top 10 or so matches along with their probabilities.
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