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IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

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Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#81

Post by SMrF »

lrm242 wrote: post #40
SMrF wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The documentary mentioned that Watson does some speech recognition. It attempts to listen to the competitor's answers so that it doesn't give a wrong answer that was already given.

No, it is fed the correct answer by text once the question is completed. They said "listen" in the documentary, but later, in passing, specified what they meant by that. In particular, the demonstrated the active learning when Watson failed to understand a category required dates as answers. After 4 it learned that dates were the type of answer required and got the last question correct. Again, the feeding of the cor…

So what translates the speech to text? I guess I just assumed they used software but perhaps there is a human doing this. I probably just missed when they mentioned this.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#82

Post by smackfu »

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.

You still have regional concerns. Some are purchased from the BBC (like some episode of Horizon or Imagine) or are co-funded (like the Earth series). Those contracts will only allow viewing in the US.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#83

Post by icefox »

rst wrote: post #50
icefox wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question I have is according to that episode Watson does not take into account the category only the 'answer' and the already shown questions. It seems _really_ odd that they would ignore this bit of information.

IIRC, they said they fixed that.

They said in the end of the episode that they started feeding him the correct questions once they are known (Thus in the example learning that all of the questions are names of months), but they didn't mention the categories that I saw.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#84

Post by icefox »

brown9-2 wrote: post #63
jarin wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since there are a lot of pun-based categories on Jeopardy, I can understand why they would have problems with it.

Exactly - the category label probably is very little help in narrowing down possible answers to a text-processing algorithm.

I would have to disagree. Every bit of information helps. I was even surprised that they didn't implement a voice to text system so that he could learn what the other contestable guessed incorrectly and utilize that information if only to not guess the same thing on his turn.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#85

Post by deltaqueue »

lrm242 wrote: post #20
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…

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.

What about video clues? I assume there is a transcript, but sometimes there's a visual reference. Perhaps some sort of integration to Tineye.com or advanced video recognition? :-)

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#86

Post by bayleo »

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…

Don't fret; you can still tune in after another decade or so for a machine to beat us at GO. Given IBM's trending business interest in corporate AI I would not be surprised if it were another IBM sponsored team that finally builds the successful bot.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#87

Post by Retric »

Kilimanjaro wrote: post #70

I'd like to see Watson as a web service.

As would I. However, due to the computer resources it takes per question it would be extremely expensive to scale.

Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. and it still takes ~15 seconds a question.

PS: Rough order of magnitude: 90 IBM Power 750 ~= 180 EC2 High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance * 15 seconds ~= $1.50 a question. (Edit: that's probably still low, each of those 750's have 16TB / 90 = 180GB of ram).

Edit2: Ouch 90 times 32 core IBM Power 750 list price is 492,210$ a month or 2.84$ per 15 seconds (http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/750/browse_aix....) and those only have 128GB of ram,

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#88

Post by dstein »

natural219 wrote: post #80
dstein wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, OCR (optical character recognition) would probably be used for reading the questions. The speech recognition would be for listening to other people's answers so as not to duplicate wrong answers.
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