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Good read, thanks. Can you comment on further Watson developments since that time?
No, as I am a spectator to the technology. I work on other things. (Parallel and distributed systems and languages for online stream processing.)
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No, as I am a spectator to the technology. I work on other things. (Parallel and distributed systems and languages for online stream processing.)
Do you work with the ibm infosphere streams?
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Seems harsh that so many people downvoted this, I dig the Slumdog Millionaire reference!
I believe that is because many people don't want comment section in Hacker News turn into the one in Reddit, which consist of mostly jokes, pop culture references...things that doesn't really contribute to the discussion.
> So we (or, more precisely, FiveThirtyEight’s lead lifestyle writer Walt Hickey) ran a simulation that flipped a weighted coin with a 97.9 percent chance of landing on a Jennings win. Every time it did, we “flipped the coin” again. We did 1 million of these simulations. This is just a binomial distribution. Did they seriously estimate the answer instead of solving it analytically?
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They made it that way on purpose, so it's more entertaining for the audience. If you could buzz in early, the players would almost always buzz in before Alex Trebek finished reading the question, which makes it less interesting for the audience. With the wait-to-buzz-in rule, the audience gets an chance to understand and maybe think of the answer before the contestants speak.
You could allow contestants to buzz in as soon as possible, but have the system wait until Alex has finished reading the answer (remember, it's Jeopardy! so the contestant gives the question ;-P) before it indicates which player buzzed in first. Yes, there might be an audible clicking sound in the background while he's talking, but it would make the game more about speed of recall rather than hand-eye coordination.
> Here’s how we figured this out. We assumed that Jennings headed into Final Jeopardy with at most one other player in contention to win. Then we assumed that in order for Jennings to lose, this sequence of events has to happen: The game must not be locked up, Jennings must get the Final Jeopardy question wrong, and the other contender must get it right. We used his stats across all 75 of his games, not just his 74 w…
Just checking my understanding.
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The traditional College Bowl / Quizbowl technique is (a) to assign a 50% penalty to the early buzz with an incorrect answer, and (b) since it's game with teams and has two teams, the rest of your team is disqualified from answering the question, leaving the opposite team with lots of time to think about it (and subsequently secure access to the 3x bonus question following every toss-up question.) Which is lots of fun…
Ack, we ran up against a "celebrity" reader in the final rounds of a Quizbowl tournament who didn't stop reading reliably when the other team buzzed in. I don't know how, but the other team was really good at taking advantage of this, buzzing in before the reader had given enough information to answer the question, and then answering after he'd finished the sentence. Our team got steamrolled.
Q: What is the capital of L-(BUZZ)-ithu-- [stops reading].
A. Vilnius.
But if they had had really good reaction time and stopped on L--, I'd have been hosed. Latvia, Lithuania, Liechtenstein, Libya, Liberia, etc...
It never occurred to me that optimized buzzer timing was such a big part of Watson's dominance. Kinda takes some of the romance out of it.
Something I never liked about jeopardy is that you can't buzz in at any time. I played on a trivia team at the high school level, and most questions were structured like: "This American architect, born in 1867, is known for works such as the Robie House, the Guggenheim Museum, and Fallingwater." So they typically feed you information from least to most well known, and you can buzz in at any time. This rewards players…
[1]: This has always struck me as an idiotic gimmick, especially since the wording rarely makes sense. No one would ever respond to the question "Who was George Washington?" with the answer "This man served as the first President of the United States."
[2]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!#CITEREFTrebekBarso...
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Ack, we ran up against a "celebrity" reader in the final rounds of a Quizbowl tournament who didn't stop reading reliably when the other team buzzed in. I don't know how, but the other team was really good at taking advantage of this, buzzing in before the reader had given enough information to answer the question, and then answering after he'd finished the sentence. Our team got steamrolled.
In Highschool Quizbowl, I'd take advantage of the fact that most untrained readers have a hard time stopping mid-syllable, or even mid-word, so any time there was a question that hinged on a single word, such as a world capital question, I'd buzz in on the first letter of the word, and they'd usually get out 2 syllables before stopping, providing enough information. Q: What is the capital of L-(BUZZ)-ithu-- [stops re…
Q: What is the capital of (BUZZ) Lithuania?
A: Vilnius.
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They made it that way on purpose, so it's more entertaining for the audience. If you could buzz in early, the players would almost always buzz in before Alex Trebek finished reading the question, which makes it less interesting for the audience. With the wait-to-buzz-in rule, the audience gets an chance to understand and maybe think of the answer before the contestants speak.
You know how annoying it is when someone tries to finish your sentence and they are completely wrong? I imagine Jeopardy without the rule to be unwatchable.
My wife, and my neighbor's husband, feel like it's the height of rudeness.
This is kind of the canonical example people can understand for the platinum vs the golden rule, as it happens.