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IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

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Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#121

Why does Watson need so much computing power? I don't know of many NLP algorithms that are so intensive?

Because in order to answer a question Watson is really executing hundreds or thousands of different algorithms in parallel to attempt to find candidate answers, and then comparing and building confidence scores for each.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#126
post #40
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…

You're talking about two different things -- SMrF is saying that if Jennings or Rutter gives an incorrect answer, Watson is able to run speech recognition on what they said, ruling out the answer they gave. This would happen before the question is completed.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#128

Why does Watson need so much computing power? I don't know of many NLP algorithms that are so intensive?

Because in order to answer a question Watson is really executing hundreds or thousands of different algorithms in parallel to attempt to find candidate answers, and then comparing and building confidence scores for each.

Thanks. Is there anything I can read to learn more about how it works in detail? All the mainstream media articles I've read are very hand-wavy.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#129
post #87

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…

That would be a cheap promotion for IBM, who presumably is getting everything at wholesale price :-)

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#130
post #66
post #57

I assume this is pre-recorded and IBM would have cancelled it if they didn't like the outcome.

It was pre-taped a few weeks ago in line with Jeopardy's usual schedule. There were a number of untelevised practice sessions beforehand against other Jeopardy contestants and wannabes. IBM did their tweaking then and promised that the actual competition rounds would be televised regardless of results.

Also if IBM were to cancel an episode that showed bad results, it'll eventually leaked out, especially for project of this caliber. It would be an instant negative publicity, since EVERY tech site would pick it up.

You'll have the scorn of all the geeks on the internet, which could be interesting lol

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