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IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

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Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#101

Post by caustic »

mcav wrote: post #51
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…

It looked like they were using Java. (Unless that was just fabricated for the screen.)

Apache UIMA is one of the building blocks of Watson -- https://cwiki.apache.org/UIMA/powered-by-apache-uima.html And UIMA is written in Java and C++.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#102

Post by crocowhile »

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…

That link just showed me 30 seconds of some commercial and AFTER told me that I cannot access their contents due to geographical restrictions.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#103

Post by jal278 »

I'm sure there are those that disagree strongly, but I feel like this isn't as much an advance for AI as it is another interesting combination of filtered human-structured knowledge and computation power. Just as Deep Blue brute-forced chess, this is mostly a brute-force of another, albeit more open-ended domain (i.e. Q/A).

I'm not arguing that this isn't an impressive accomplishment, but that the statistical-learning stream of research is likely a conceptual local optima that yields the best results in the near term but is probably unrelated to the way we ultimately achieve a creative, general AI.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#104

Post by alanfalcon »

deltaqueue wrote: post #85
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.

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? :-)

No video or audio clues in this tournament.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#105

Post by Charuru »

yumraj wrote: post #97
Charuru wrote: post #95

Shouldn't IBM start their own search engine if they have algorithms like this? Or conversely, maybe Google should buy them?

Or conversely, maybe Google should buy them? I wish you had checked the market cap of IBM and Google before suggesting that :). IBM > GOOG

You're right. Looks like IBM is doing pretty well.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#106

Post by icegreentea »

Charuru wrote: post #95

Shouldn't IBM start their own search engine if they have algorithms like this? Or conversely, maybe Google should buy them?

IBM wants to sell the stuff that's Watson's based on to companies. Companies will get their own 'answer engine'. I guess they think that licenses will make them more money than ad-money for search engines. Which could well be true in this case. Watson's insane knowledge still won't give me the cat pictures I want.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#107

Post by nocman »

lrm242 wrote: post #52
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…

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…

"Watson can understand and answer better than the vast majority of humans on this planet."

Only for extremely limited definitions of "understand".

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#109

Post by BoppreH »

ugh wrote: post #11
umjames wrote: 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?

Because the challenge proposed is not about reaction times.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#110

Post by ugh »

BoppreH wrote: post #109
ugh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because the challenge proposed is not about reaction times.

How so? The challenge seems to me to be all about the question whether a computer can beat humans at Jeopardy. Reaction times are a part of that.
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