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IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

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Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#71

Post by metageek »

ugh wrote: post #62
Bud wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've market-tested this approach to fund-raising for a non-profit, then, I assume?

How much more does it cost them to make their content available worldwide? Couldn’t they upload everything to YouTube and let Google foot the bill? (Which Google would gladly do.) I don’t know whether more people would donate if they made their content available worldwide but if such a move wouldn’t cost them anything or nearly nothing there certainly wouldn’t be any harm in doing so.

Mmm. They could try it; but the only shows for which it would be easy to try it would be those for which they own the copyright. I don't know whether that would be a representative sample.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#72

Post by ck2 »

jasonkester wrote: post #41
brown9-2 wrote: post #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 t…

(if you're in the United States) Amazing that PBS is locking down their videos. They're public television fer cryin' out loud.

PBS is basically "owned" by the corporations that advertise now in front of every show. Congress keeps cutting back their funding and viewer donations are a fraction of their operating budget.

In a few tiny ways their low budget is a good thing, ie. PBS Newshour doesn't have the insane stupid graphics/animations/toys that mainstream news does.

But in almost every other way their low budget in ruining the experience now.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#74

Post by troymc »

foresterh wrote: post #59
dstein wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's ironic, because "HAL" is a shift of IBM: [I B M] - [1 1 1] = [H A L].

Apparently Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick didn't notice this. "As it happened, IBM had given us a good deal of help, so we were quite embarrassed by this, and would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence." - A.C.C.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#76

Post by baddox »

dstein wrote: post #43
lrm242 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kind of agree, but OCR with a stable camera on the clue board would be extremely fast, reliable, and trivial, so it wouldn't make it much more impressive. Voice recognition (without OCR or a text interface to fall back on) would certainly be impressive, but I doubt it would be very reliable or impressive. I may be underestimating the state of the art on voice recognition; it may be very accurate considering Trebek's great diction and the clean studio audio that would be captured.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#77

Post by metageek »

ugh wrote: post #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…

>Everybody knows what chess is all about,

Well, that's kind of the point. Chess is a hard game, but it doesn't require broad knowledge of a human culture. If you're going to build a machine that exhibits such knowledge, you've got to pick a culture.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#78

Post by ugh »

metageek wrote: post #77
ugh wrote: post #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…

> Everybody knows what chess is all about, Well, that's kind of the point. Chess is a hard game, but it doesn't require broad knowledge of a human culture. If you're going to build a machine that exhibits such knowledge, you've got to pick a culture.

That’s why I wrote “necessarily!” Jeopardy is certainly a great pick, I can’t think of anything better.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#79

Post by metageek »

kenjackson wrote: post #29
KevBurnsJr wrote: post #19

Is there somewhere in Silicon Valley to watch this together in person?

The geek equivalent to the sports bar... There must be some website for doing this, right?

Actually, that might be your answer: if 100 geeks show up at a sports bar and ask them to turn one of the TVs to Jeopardy, maybe they'll do it.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#80

Post by natural219 »

dstein wrote: post #60
lrm242 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You realize that if it were only to recognize speech, other players would have a significant time advantage because they can read the text in probably 1/10th of the time it takes the host to speak the question out loud. "Feeding" Watson the text is just another way of saying Watson "reads" the text displayed on the screen, just like every human is allowed to.
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