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IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

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Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#11
post #4

Much of success on Jeopardy is not just deciphering clues in the answers, but your timing on ringing in to give the question. I'd imagine a machine could get really good at getting the timing down. Does Jeopardy have a way of varying who rings in first to keep things more fair?

That’s Jeopardy. Whoever buzzes first gets to answer, I don’t see what’s unfair about that. Computers can react faster than humans, why should they be denied that advantage?

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#13
One thing I'm interested in is any skew in the questions from normal. In particular I hope they ask linguistically tricky questions where you can't even figure out what's being asked at first. I felt like they went a bit easy on that front in the preview round:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#14

Is there somewhere to watch this online?

I had thought from the counter that IBM had run on the Watson page that there might be but it seems that us non-US residents will have to wait. Still very much looking forward to this. History in the making.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#15
You can watch the PBS Nova episode about the building of Watson for free on their website (about 60 minutes long, aired Feb 9 2011):

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth....

One question I have about Watson that I don't recall being mentioned in any videos or articles so far - what sort of interface does Watson receive the questions over? Is Watson performing speech recognition or getting the text of the question via some sort of interface?

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#16

Is there somewhere to watch this online?

Hulu refers to crackle.com. Crackle has "minisodes" which seem to date from 2002-2003.

It is owned by Sony, distributed by CBS and seems to be syndicated, which means there is no network that carries it specifically, and thus no online distribution, as each market has a different station (Eg: Fox might buy it in one market while ABC might buy it in another).

This is near as I can tell looking into it.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#17
post #7
post #4

Much of success on Jeopardy is not just deciphering clues in the answers, but your timing on ringing in to give the question. I'd imagine a machine could get really good at getting the timing down. Does Jeopardy have a way of varying who rings in first to keep things more fair?

The timing of when players are allowed to click in is controlled by a human. Someone backstage decides at what moment Alex is finished speaking and then opens the clickers. If you click too early, you get ~ 300ms delay penalty which gives the other players a chance to click in. Click timing is indeed very important but I do not think Watson has any special advantage there.

But there's a visual cue letting the players know that clickers are open (a light flashes, I think), so the computer probably gets some notification too, at which point it could instabuzz.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#18
It’s a shame that this is (necessarily!) such an insular challenge. Everybody knows what chess is all about, I fear that the impact of this game will be limited to the US or the Anglosphere. Just as an example, there has been no Jeopardy on German TV since 2000, it’s not really a part of German pop culture and because of all the puns it doesn’t translate well.

(Question for native speakers: When watching the practice round [0] are you generally able to keep up and answer the questions? The speed with which the game was moving made it nearly impossible for me to follow or enjoy the game. I would like to know what the experience is like for native speakers.)

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR3lOm_xhE

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#20

You can watch the PBS Nova episode about the building of Watson for free on their website (about 60 minutes long, aired Feb 9 2011): http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth.... One question I have about Watson that I don't recall being mentioned in any videos or articles so far - what sort of interface does Watson receive the questions over? Is Watson performing speech recognition or getting the t…

This was answered in the Nova special, in passing. The question is fed to Watson as text at the same moment it appears on the display that the contestants can see. Likewise for correct answers. Watson is not performing speech recognition.
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