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IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

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Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#121

Post by baddox »

kenjackson wrote: post #108
baddox wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand and appreciate what Watson is doing. It's awesome and ground-breaking. However, with contestants of this skill level, most of the responses will be known by all contestants, and the real competition is how fast you can buzz in after the light turns on indicating the clue has been completed . Think of it this way: if you had a human standing in Watson's spot, with a monitor displaying Watson's suggested r…

with contestants of this skill level Do you see what you're saying.. "contestants of this skill level"? It's Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and WATSON . Discussion over. The fact that there is a computer that can answer questions in 3s that put it at the level of the two greatest trivia players in history is THE story. Some jeopardy answers: Anagramed Animals -- A furry little pet: the rams Some say the Bush administrati…

I am expressing marvel that a computer can respond to many Jeopardy! clues in 3 seconds. That is marvelous, amazing, and awesome. Don't infer that I am undervaluing that achievement.

The additional fact that this computer can beat human players is not impressive to me, because I know how Jeopardy! works. To sum everything up: it's a great feat of artificial intelligence and computer performance for Watson to generate correct responses so quickly; it's not a great feat for Watson to be able to buzz in faster than human competitors. I think IBM could have chosen a better sort of competition to truly show off Watson's abilities than a competition with reflexes as the final layer of competition.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#122

Post by azakai »

baddox wrote: post #102
DonnyV wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you fully understand what is going on here. Watson will Process the slang in the sentence, figure out how the words are being used, understand the context of the question and then look through its internal databases to see if it can piece different pieces of knowledge that it has to come up with an answer. THATS FUCKING HUGE!!!

What led you to believe that I don't understand what's going on? I definitely understand and appreciate IBM's accomplishment. I'm not minimizing the coolness of Watson being able to come up with so many correct responses, I'm minimizing the importance of its actual Jeopardy! gameplay. I'm not sure you understand the real game mechanics of Jeopardy! With highly proficient contestants, it comes down to being able to bu…

I think you are exactly right. Other commenters seem to be misunderstanding you.

It's clear that this is a huge achievement. However, it is different than a computer beating the human chess champion. All this will prove is that a computer is about the same as the best humans, not strictly better than them.

(And, that it is strictly better at timing its buzzer response, which is completely not impressive for a machine to excel at.)

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#123

Post by kenjackson »

baddox wrote: post #121
kenjackson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with contestants of this skill level Do you see what you're saying.. "contestants of this skill level"? It's Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and WATSON . Discussion over. The fact that there is a computer that can answer questions in 3s that put it at the level of the two greatest trivia players in history is THE story. Some jeopardy answers: Anagramed Animals -- A furry little pet: the rams Some say the Bush administrati…

I am expressing marvel that a computer can respond to many Jeopardy! clues in 3 seconds. That is marvelous, amazing, and awesome. Don't infer that I am undervaluing that achievement. The additional fact that this computer can beat human players is not impressive to me, because I know how Jeopardy! works. To sum everything up: it's a great feat of artificial intelligence and computer performance for Watson to generate…

I just submitted this story (http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-watson-sees-...), but here is a quote from it that was interesting:

"The best human contestants don’t wait for, but instead anticipate when Trebek will finish reading a clue. They time their “buzz” for the instant when the last word leaves Trebek’s mouth and the “Buzzer Enable” light turns on. Watson cannot anticipate. He can only react to the enable signal. While Watson reacts at an impressive speed, humans can and do buzz in faster than his best possible reaction time."

I suspect if anyone is good at anticipating the buzzer it is Jennings and Rutter -- the two best Jeopardy players in history. At least until next week...

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#124

Post by defen »

demallien wrote: post #26
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior. We have no more to fear from it, than from a punch and judy show. Cleverer and cleverer puppets will not become intelligent machines. A dedicated effort to build a massive neural cluster simulation might become intelligent, but it will think such incomprehensible thoughts as to be fairly useless to us (think intelligent rhododendon; what would…

And how will we know that Watson actually feels fear, or will we just get someone else saying "Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior" response? Anyway, the answer to this type of conundrum is simple and well-known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test Of course it should be noted that we aren't there yet for Watson. Even in the restricted domain of a game show, when Watson fails…

> Anyway, the answer to this type of conundrum is simple and well-known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

I prefer the Voight-Kampff test:

1. It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?

2. You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?

3. You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.

etc.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#125

Post by mcrittenden »

ZoFreX wrote: post #116

> When the software was run on a lone 2.6 GHz CPU, it took around 2 hours to process a typical Jeopardy clue -- not a very practical implementation. But when they parallelized the algorithms across the 2,880-core Watson, they were able to cut the processing time from a couple of hours to between 2 and 6 seconds. That is an impressive amount of parallelism! This is very back of the napkin (and I realise I'm comparing…

What's 3.55?

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#126

Post by baddox »

kenjackson wrote: post #123
baddox wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am expressing marvel that a computer can respond to many Jeopardy! clues in 3 seconds. That is marvelous, amazing, and awesome. Don't infer that I am undervaluing that achievement. The additional fact that this computer can beat human players is not impressive to me, because I know how Jeopardy! works. To sum everything up: it's a great feat of artificial intelligence and computer performance for Watson to generate…

I just submitted this story ( http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-watson-sees-... ), but here is a quote from it that was interesting: "The best human contestants don’t wait for, but instead anticipate when Trebek will finish reading a clue. They time their “buzz” for the instant when the last word leaves Trebek’s mouth and the “Buzzer Enable” light turns on. Watson cannot anticipate. He can only react to…

I'm skeptical of that. Is the Watson's computer to solenoid path really slower than the brain to muscle path of a human? Sure, an anticipatory human could buzz in after the light is electronically triggered but before the luminescent fixture (LED, or whatever) fired up, but humans will also undoubtedly jump the gun and buzz in too early, causing them to be locked out. To say that a human, even a seasoned Jeopardy! player, could beat a computer and solenoid any significant portion of the time, is something I have a lot of trouble accepting.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#127

Post by whatusername »

spot wrote: post #6

> Watson is comprised of 90 Power 750 servers, 16 TB of memory and 4 TB of disk storage 4TB disk? something is wrong here.

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/In...

"Several readers of my blog have asked for details on the storage aspects of Watson. Basically, it is a modified version of IBM Scale-Out NAS [SONAS] that IBM offers commercially, but running Linux on POWER instead of Linux-x86. System p expansion drawers of SAS 15K RPM 450GB drives, 12 drives each, are dual-connected to two storage nodes, for a total of 21.6TB of raw disk capacity. The storage nodes use IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) to provide clustered NFS access to the rest of the system. Each Power 750 has minimal internal storage mostly to hold the Linux operating system and programs.

When Watson is booted up, the 15TB of total RAM are loaded up, and thereafter the DeepQA processing is all done from memory. According to IBM Research, "The actual size of the data (analyzed and indexed text, knowledge bases, etc.) used for candidate answer generation and evidence evaluation is under 1TB." For performance reasons, various subsets of the data are replicated in RAM on different functional groups of cluster nodes. The entire system is self-contained, Watson is NOT going to the internet searching for answers. "

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#128

Post by kenjackson »

baddox wrote: post #126
kenjackson wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just submitted this story ( http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-watson-sees-... ), but here is a quote from it that was interesting: "The best human contestants don’t wait for, but instead anticipate when Trebek will finish reading a clue. They time their “buzz” for the instant when the last word leaves Trebek’s mouth and the “Buzzer Enable” light turns on. Watson cannot anticipate. He can only react to…

I'm skeptical of that. Is the Watson's computer to solenoid path really slower than the brain to muscle path of a human? Sure, an anticipatory human could buzz in after the light is electronically triggered but before the luminescent fixture (LED, or whatever) fired up, but humans will also undoubtedly jump the gun and buzz in too early, causing them to be locked out. To say that a human, even a seasoned Jeopardy! pl…

I don't think its all that hard to believe. Remember that Watson also has to depress a physical button (the same buzzer everyone else uses).

The eye to finger path for humans is about 200ms. It probably takes about 100ms for Watson to physically press the button. So Watson is about 100ms faster. But that also gives humans about a 100ms window in which to beat Watson. This means that you need to start your press 100-200ms before Trebek finishes his last word.

That's pretty good sized window for most people given you are reading the question along with Trebek. If the person who turns the light on is very consistent, I think a human who is good at this could consistently beat Watson.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#129

Post by jhpriestley »

kenjackson wrote: post #119
jhpriestley wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people in the US could answer these if given access to wikipedia, the OED, etc? Nearly anyone.

So you're saying that a human aided by a computer, internet connection, and access to additional data can answer intentionally formed trivia questions as well as an unmanned computer (although I suspect a fair bit slower)? This is the biggest innovation in computers in my lifetime and kids are like, "but its no Twitter".

I'm saying that Watson's advantage in trivia-answering comes mainly from aptitudes which are already well-known to favor the computer.

Watson's human-level performance at Jeopardy comes from the combination of highly superhuman data retrieval with highly subhuman language processing.

Watson is more a spectacle than an innovation.

Re: IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

#130

Post by nl »

jhpriestley wrote: post #129
kenjackson wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're saying that a human aided by a computer, internet connection, and access to additional data can answer intentionally formed trivia questions as well as an unmanned computer (although I suspect a fair bit slower)? This is the biggest innovation in computers in my lifetime and kids are like, "but its no Twitter".

I'm saying that Watson's advantage in trivia-answering comes mainly from aptitudes which are already well-known to favor the computer. Watson's human-level performance at Jeopardy comes from the combination of highly superhuman data retrieval with highly subhuman language processing. Watson is more a spectacle than an innovation.

And here we see the AI paradox..

As soon as AI succeeds at something, it is simple.

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