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IBM Watson's team Q&A on reddit

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Re: IBM Watson's team Q&A on reddit

#21

Post by lmkg »

Jd wrote: post #8

Question 3 was the most interesting but data on parsing remarkably incomplete. As far as I can tell, we have only lists of possible ways to break down the data without any explanation of how or why one possible way is preferred to another. Case in point (1):How it decides to treat "Treasure Island" as a proper noun. We see only "modifies(Treasure, Island)" -- indicating that it treats treasure and adjective modifying…

> I assume what he is giving us is method names written in Java with "Treasure Island" as the single argument that return a value indicating the likelihood that "Treasure Island" is what the method name refers to.

The sample queries struck me as Prolog rather than Java, even before they mentioned it. Using Prolog would allow testing the combination of various propositions in addition to the individual values. This would imply that they derive a list of possible assertions, then try combinations of those assertions and see what values of X will match those assertions. How they avoid combinatorial explosion when testing all those assertion combinations, I have no idea, but it must involve ranking and pruning.

Re: IBM Watson's team Q&A on reddit

#22

Post by gojomo »

brisance wrote: post #19
blhack wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this is marketing. IBM makes BIG HUGE MASSIVE (tm) server clusters that have lots of blinkenlights and require lots of power and are so crazy and huge and awesome that the people working at IBM must be hyper-geniuses! vs Watson runs on a laptop.

I can't see how that would be marketing. Most people would be more impressed if Watson could run on a laptop, today. I know I would.

More impressed? Yes. More willing to spend millions on hardware and software? No.

Re: IBM Watson's team Q&A on reddit

#23

Post by wtallis »

gojomo wrote: post #22
brisance wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see how that would be marketing. Most people would be more impressed if Watson could run on a laptop, today. I know I would.

More impressed? Yes. More willing to spend millions on hardware and software? No.

I can see IBM charging customers millions a year to keep their Watson database up to date, even if it ends up running on an x86 Linux box. When they adapt it for general Q&A use, Watson will probably be as useful as Wolfram Alpha wishes it was.

Re: IBM Watson's team Q&A on reddit

#24

Post by whatusername »

blhack wrote: post #17
gojomo wrote: post #12

Alas, my somewhat-skeptical question came in late and got little support: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fnfg3/by_request_we_ar... What determined the use of exactly 10 racks of 9 maxed-out (32-core, 512GB RAM) 4U Power750 servers? For example, would Watson have done better with more hardware? Or could it have made-do with far less, after all the bulk pre-processing of, and training on, source material was fin…

I wonder if this is marketing. IBM makes BIG HUGE MASSIVE (tm) server clusters that have lots of blinkenlights and require lots of power and are so crazy and huge and awesome that the people working at IBM must be hyper-geniuses! vs Watson runs on a laptop.

Watson can run on a laptop.

It just can't get the answers fast enough to win Jeopardy. https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/In...

Re: IBM Watson's team Q&A on reddit

#25

Post by natrius »

ppod wrote: post #13
Jd wrote: post #8

Question 3 was the most interesting but data on parsing remarkably incomplete. As far as I can tell, we have only lists of possible ways to break down the data without any explanation of how or why one possible way is preferred to another. Case in point (1):How it decides to treat "Treasure Island" as a proper noun. We see only "modifies(Treasure, Island)" -- indicating that it treats treasure and adjective modifying…

A while ago I submitted a link to a blog post( http://bit.ly/igJeRB ) I did that goes into the system in a bit more depth, based on a paper IBM published - there's a link to the paper (open access) there too. For your cases, from what I got from reading papers: (1) You could spend two weeks only reading papers on noun-compound semantics. Try a google scholar search just to get an idea of the volume of research. A sim…

For more on (2), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-order_logic

Re: IBM Watson's team Q&A on reddit

#26

Post by brisance »

gojomo wrote: post #22
brisance wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see how that would be marketing. Most people would be more impressed if Watson could run on a laptop, today. I know I would.

More impressed? Yes. More willing to spend millions on hardware and software? No.

And how would they look if, as the original poster surmised, it were possible for a competitor to produce something similar to Watson on today's laptop? IBM would've spent millions of dollars making themselves look very silly.

It's a similar situation to moon-landing skepticism. If it didn't happen, it would be trivial for the Soviet Union to disgrace and discredit the achievement by faking their own.

Re: IBM Watson's team Q&A on reddit

#27

Post by trickjarrett »

ars wrote: post #20
kenjackson wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's true for normal Jeopardy too. The best buzzer person (Ken Jennings or Brad Rutter) wins because of their reflexes and timing. Watson just took that edge off the table and flipped it back at them.

I meant change it for regular Jeopardy as well.

That's good for a intellectual challenge, but for game shows to work, they need to be questions that players at home, viewers who earn them their advertising dollars, know. They want us to be sitting on the couch shouting out the answers. If we're sitting there clueless, it's a much shorter distance to changing the channel or taking it off the dvr.

Re: IBM Watson's team Q&A on reddit

#28

Post by gojomo »

brisance wrote: post #26
gojomo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More impressed? Yes. More willing to spend millions on hardware and software? No.

And how would they look if, as the original poster surmised, it were possible for a competitor to produce something similar to Watson on today's laptop? IBM would've spent millions of dollars making themselves look very silly. It's a similar situation to moon-landing skepticism. If it didn't happen, it would be trivial for the Soviet Union to disgrace and discredit the achievement by faking their own.

No other team was given a crack at the Jeopardy spotlight. IBM didn't win against a bunch of other teams for the slot on the human/machine faceoff; it was all orchestrated for them. So give others some time to emerge.

I suspect in a year or two – perhaps sooner, if an organized open competition with real cash prizes is launched – we'll have a better idea of what a lean team could do on the trivia domain. It may not be reduced to a single 2011-equivalent laptop... but it might be a single 2011-equivalent maxed-out-server (rather than a Watson-like server room).

Re: IBM Watson's team Q&A on reddit

#29

Post by alanfalcon »

gojomo wrote: post #14
patrickod wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while yes human reaction times are nowhere near as good as those achievable with computers I think the physical pressing of the buzzer was enough to level the playing field. I can't remember where I read it but it seems that at most Watson had 100ms of an advantage if he was confident of his answer before the buzzers opened. I also can't think of a consistent way of getting rid of this time gap.

Parts of the game were eliminated to give Watson a chance: audio/video clues, and categories that required extra explanation. If the exact timing of buzzing in – and not 'first' but 'first after a light goes on'– gave an overwhelming advantage to Watson, that could be eliminated, too. For example, why not just 'first to buzz in'? (That is, no penalty for being early?) Let Watson's parsing of the question text race th…

You can program a computer to wait until it has high confidence before buzzing in, but would you trust a human to wait to buzz in until he has already chosen his answer? In many situations, a contestant will buzz in knowing they're likely to be able to determine the answer in the five seconds they're given after being called upon. You'd be trading one player's perceived advantage for another.

Re: IBM Watson's team Q&A on reddit

#30

Post by blhack »

brisance wrote: post #19
blhack wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this is marketing. IBM makes BIG HUGE MASSIVE (tm) server clusters that have lots of blinkenlights and require lots of power and are so crazy and huge and awesome that the people working at IBM must be hyper-geniuses! vs Watson runs on a laptop.

I can't see how that would be marketing. Most people would be more impressed if Watson could run on a laptop, today. I know I would.

Most programmers would, but any non-technical people would think that you could hire a programmer to do the same thing for $1000.
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