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IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

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Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#151
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the case of Deep Blue the movement of the pieces isn't pertinent to the game - if human/robot assistants moved all pieces for both players it wouldn't alter the result [except possibly in some very edge cases].

For IBM Watson playing Jeopardy against humans the buzzer reaction time is exceedingly important. The buzzer is an integral, possibly even central, part of the game.

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#152
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).

I was interested in this too - http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/fl477/tonight_a_... was the first few clues fed in to Google.

What I found was that the answer was in the snippets on the first SERP but certainly for some of the questions it seemed pretty hard to parse it out.

Also I think Jeopardy got 1 or possibly 2 answers wrong

- White City was the City of the 1908 Olympics, it was in London Borough or Greater London but not in the City of London (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London). White City is a borough and not a city, which makes this a really hard question for a computer to answer I think.

- Nagini killed whatever Harry Potter character was mentioned ; I'm not familiar with the series and didn't see this question this was just based on a comment on Reddit and a Google for "killed $CharName" (I have a really bad memory).

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#153
(This is just for kicks.)

Assuming the space required to run watson halves every two years and v:: of the human brain is v1 = 1500cm³, and Σv of Watson's servers = v2 = 90 x (17.5cm x 44.0cm x 73.0xcm) = 5.05e6 cm^3.

So Watson will be the size of a human brain in t = - ln(v1/v2)/ln(2).

We're looking at 11.7 years. So, 2023.

* Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_%28artificial_intelligen...

"Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers..."

* Source: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/750/specs.html

"175 mm x 440 mm x 730 mm"

Re: IBM's Watson starts on Jeopardy Tonight

#154
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the challenge proposed is not about reaction times.

How so? The challenge seems to me to be all about the question whether a computer can beat humans at Jeopardy. Reaction times are a part of that.

Because it goes against the spirit of the competition. Nobody would be impressed if IBM built a machine that could simply buzz in faster than Jennings and Rutter.
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