Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

jeopardy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 154 posts

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#131

Post by bryanh »

olalonde wrote: post #113

Suppose Watson scales cheaply (it doesn't), would it be serious threat to Google? My guess is that it would be but I'd be curious to hear HN's take.

I think it's fun to think about how Watson type intelligence will be at the average consumer's figertips (and affordable, to boot) in less that 20 years.

A quick look at the TOP500 supercomputers puts about a 10,000x increase in raw flops since 1993. Using that as a rough benchmark (a very rough one), we're looking at some impressive stuff in the next twenty years. It's not unreasonable to think that:

    current consumer processor in FLOPS * 10,000
Naturally, that is a very rough estimate and has no scientific bearing at all.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#132

Post by ajays »

SMrF wrote: post #30
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 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.

This is not true, apparently. Watson gave the same answer as another contestant (Ken).

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#133

Post by ajays »

jasonkester wrote: post #46
xxpor wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is the BBC.

Not in the same way. PBS never plays commercials and actually takes several days off each year to ask people to donate money so that they can continue broadcasting. It genuinely is supported by individual donations. Showing their programs to a wider audience could only result in more people donating to them.

"PBS never plays commercials..."

Have you watched KQED (PBS affiliate in the Bay Area) recently? It's filled with commercials! HHMI, Subaru, etc. Not just static images; video commercials, just like you see in other channels. I wonder what sets PBS apart now (except for the pledge drive) ?

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#134

Post by ajays »

KevBurnsJr wrote: post #19

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

I just walked into my local bar, asked the bartender to switch to channel 7, and voila! There weren't too many people around, but it was fun (and between breaks I chatted with a couple of drunk chicks who were trying to drown their V-Day sorrows in shots of vodka).

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#135

Post by SoftwareMaven »

lorax wrote: post #114

I hope someone writes down all the answers (questions?) and feeds them into google so we can have a Google-Watson showdown. (Oh, we need a third contestant, how about bing too).

Is it bad that I thought "Oh, so you are going to have Google compete twice"? ;)

It would be interesting to feed to clues into Google to see what comes out. There are easy ones like http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=115... but I'm sure there are also some that Google wouldn't have a clue.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#136

Post by timerickson »

ajays wrote: post #132
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.

This is not true, apparently. Watson gave the same answer as another contestant (Ken).

Assuming the speech recognition software didn't simply fail, and that it in fact, does not exist.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#137

Post by bugsy »

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.

Well is the text "fed" in a word at a time, or the whole question as a block that takes nanoseconds to parse. That's an unfair advantage if so because because the computer is getting the data in a different format than the other contestants, who are handicapped since they have to preprocess the data in a way the computer doesn't because it has been preprocessed in advance for it.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#138

Post by alxp »

jimmyjim wrote: post #32
brown9-2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, this is what I assumed (as ASR of these questions is probably just as hard as the interpretation). How does Watson know when it can chime in then?

I would think as soon as it computes an answer. Of course there is a penalty for getting an answer wrong, so it can't be pressing the button all the time. But the PBS documentary I think hinted that it will be a sent a signal to know what amount to wait before reading aloud an answer. That said, I wish the engineers would have implemented OCR technology into Watson so it could see the TV screen, decipher the text que…

I don't think that's relevant. No one expected Deep Blue to have a mechanical arm that reaches out and moves pieces around a physical chess board.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#139

Post by alxp »

osipov wrote: post #98
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?

Looks like Google and IBM are evenly matched in terms of market cap so a buy out is unlikely http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=IBM+GOOG+market+cap QA technology is very different than search because the former makes strong assumptions about quality of the underlying data. Google's search is much better at filtering out and dealing with low quality content (e.g. blogs) and spam.

Hah now Wolfram Alpha, I wonder if they're going to bother coming back in to work tomorrow. Watson makes it look pretty primitive.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#140

Post by bjg »

savrajsingh wrote: post #127

Did anyone else notice that the vignettes about Watson's creation featured IBM researchers using MacBook Pros? So much for "International Business Machines." ;)

As a former IBM employee, you can pretty much use what ever type of machine you want for your work as long as it doesn't interfere with what you do. There is a significant Mac subculture internal to IBM, and they love and suppor it. However a huge percent of their 600,000 employee's still use IBM branded laptop's and desktop's.
Post reply on HN