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…
It looked like they were using Java. (Unless that was just fabricated for the screen.)
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.
The question is fed to Watson as text Aw this seems rather half-assed to me. I hope at a later time they do another one of these with a new and improved Watson. I really want to see a humanoid robot standing on the podium (connected by wifi to the supercomputer) and using OCR and speech recognition. I also think Watson's voice should be more authoritative. It's like they went to extraordinary effort to make Watson so…
It can always be "awesomer". However, calling it half-assed I think is a bit harsh. The truly novel aspects of Watson are that in its abilies in to answer questions in a truly domian-free way. It is not trained to be an expert in a specific domain, but instead to calculate what it believes to be the best answer from any domain. This is truly novel and amazing. That it can do this with Jeopardy questions, regardless of how it is given those questions, is truly remarkable. Jeopardy questions are often times laden with puns or other literay devices. Watson can understand and answer better than the vast majority of humans on this planet. That it can't currently "see" or "hear" is, IMO, less interesting given the advances it makes in deep QA.
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…
(if you're in the United States) Amazing that PBS is locking down their videos. They're public television fer cryin' out loud.
What's amazing to me is NPR, PBS, CBC and BBC haven't gotten together to make their own public domain codecs. It's kind of their job to do this stuff. I guess if you take contributions from "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation", you got make some compromises.
In case anyone is interested to know Watson's opponents: Watson will compete against Brad Rutter, the current biggest all-time money winner on Jeopardy!, and Ken Jennings, the record holder for the longest championship streak [source: wikipedia]
In case anyone missed it the first time around, the nytimes mag had a pretty good writeup on Watson back in June -- might be worth instapapering and reading later if you're going to catch the broadcast this week:
As an AI researcher I'm excited to watch this week. Even if it's not the most elegant artificial Jeopardy player imaginable, it raises the public profile of a lot of AI & ML topics and might encourage and inspire other groups to tackle ambitious projects.
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.
The question is fed to Watson as text Aw this seems rather half-assed to me. I hope at a later time they do another one of these with a new and improved Watson. I really want to see a humanoid robot standing on the podium (connected by wifi to the supercomputer) and using OCR and speech recognition. I also think Watson's voice should be more authoritative. It's like they went to extraordinary effort to make Watson so…
They took a lesson from Dr. Soong, skipped Lore and went straight to Data.
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.
The question is fed to Watson as text Aw this seems rather half-assed to me. I hope at a later time they do another one of these with a new and improved Watson. I really want to see a humanoid robot standing on the podium (connected by wifi to the supercomputer) and using OCR and speech recognition. I also think Watson's voice should be more authoritative. It's like they went to extraordinary effort to make Watson so…
I'm pretty sure his voice is just a tribute to HAL. I like it.
The question is fed to Watson as text Aw this seems rather half-assed to me. I hope at a later time they do another one of these with a new and improved Watson. I really want to see a humanoid robot standing on the podium (connected by wifi to the supercomputer) and using OCR and speech recognition. I also think Watson's voice should be more authoritative. It's like they went to extraordinary effort to make Watson so…
It can always be "awesomer". However, calling it half-assed I think is a bit harsh. The truly novel aspects of Watson are that in its abilies in to answer questions in a truly domian-free way. It is not trained to be an expert in a specific domain, but instead to calculate what it believes to be the best answer from any domain. This is truly novel and amazing. That it can do this with Jeopardy questions, regardless o…
I didn't mean to sound harsh - I understand the significance. I just meant the technology involved in Watson being able to answer such questions is undoubtedly orders of magnitude more complex than the OCR and speech recognition required to process the question in the first place.
They're playing a "human" game after all, and they're not playing like a human is fed into the computer electronically.