Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

hpcwire.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 148 posts

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

#111

Post by demallien »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #103
demallien wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Passing the Turing Test is a bit (a lot!) harder than fooling someone that isn't paying attention. The computer has to respond reasonably to any conversational gambit offered by someone actively seeking to probe the computer. Can the computer correctly identify a pun? Does it have enough "common sense" to identify nonsense phrases such as "the waterfall ran up the aide of the mountain"? Does it understand the difference between a running stream, a running man and a running engine?

If your chatscript can negotiate this type of test, then it would satisfy me that it was thinking.

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

#113

Post by nooneelse »

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…

It could also make a decent living in tech support too.

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

#114

Post by RoboTeddy »

Here's a fascinating overview of how Watson (DeepQA) works:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc

The video goes into some detail, and looks at how Watson analyzes particular questions.

It feels like AI is starting to become what people once thought it could be.

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

#115

Post by kenjackson »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #72
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 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…

Trivia questions are quite guessable.

I think you overestimate human interaction. :-)

Look at how many people will have full on conversations with bots. And these aren't even good bots.

An IRC based Turing test will be passed in the next 15 years. The corpus that we have with Google/Bing/Wikipedia add to that emails from GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail, IMs and text message, Facebook messages and statuses.

The computer will not only be able to have conversation, but it will be able to go from talking to you in the Queen's English to ebonics. And will be the most knowledgeable person you've ever met.

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

#116

Post by ZoFreX »

> When the software was run on a lone 2.6 GHz CPU, it took around 2 hours to process a typical Jeopardy clue -- not a very practical implementation. But when they parallelized the algorithms across the 2,880-core Watson, they were able to cut the processing time from a couple of hours to between 2 and 6 seconds.

That is an impressive amount of parallelism! This is very back of the napkin (and I realise I'm comparing apples and oranges), but a rough estimate for the time taken if the problem was parallelised with 100% efficiency would be:

(2 hours) / ((2880 * 3.55) / 2.6) = 1.83098592 seconds

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

#117

Post by jhpriestley »

kenjackson wrote: post #108
baddox wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 administrati…

How many people in the US could answer these if given access to wikipedia, the OED, etc? Nearly anyone.

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

#118

Post by johanbev »

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…

The main difference between chess and Jeopardy is that Watson has to interpret ambigous (and awkwardly presented) "answers" and interpret what will be a suitable "question" to that. Both these two are really difficult. Watson needs a lot of natural language understanding across all lingusitic domains to even be able to search its databases and rule engines and what have you.

Chess, in contrast, is a totally deterministic game and the game state can easily be fed into a computer. That computers are able to beat humans at that comes as no surprise.

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

#119

Post by kenjackson »

jhpriestley wrote: post #117
kenjackson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 administrati…

How many people in the US could answer these if given access to wikipedia, the OED, etc? Nearly anyone.

So you're saying that a human aided by a computer, internet connection, and access to additional data can answer intentionally formed trivia questions as well as an unmanned computer (although I suspect a fair bit slower)?

This is the biggest innovation in computers in my lifetime and kids are like, "but its no Twitter".

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

#120

Post by baddox »

kenjackson wrote: post #119
jhpriestley wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people in the US could answer these if given access to wikipedia, the OED, etc? Nearly anyone.

So you're saying that a human aided by a computer, internet connection, and access to additional data can answer intentionally formed trivia questions as well as an unmanned computer (although I suspect a fair bit slower)? This is the biggest innovation in computers in my lifetime and kids are like, "but its no Twitter".

Watson doesn't have internet access. It has just learned from thousands of sources and thousands of Jeopardy! questions. Just like human Jeopardy! contestants.
Post reply on HN