Supercomputer utterly destroys all-time champs on Jeopardy

Hotair ^ | 02/16/2011 | Allahpundit

[ICU812]

I’m a programmer. Never worked with AI but I imagine getting a program to recognize puns and wordplay and other features of natural language is incredibly difficult. What is impressive is not that it could quickly pull the answer out of a database but rather that it could understand the clue enough to know what information to look for.

[ssaftler]

I’ve been a long-time Jeopardy fan, but I tuned out about half way through the second episode of the IBM infomercial hosted by Alex Trebek last night. I hope Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings got some decent coin from the producers via IBM for playing patsy to this sham.

[TexasPatriot1]

Prove it.

[JRios1968]

"You don't want to know what machines did to your mother last night, Trebek!"

[KarlInOhio]

Does the player get to read the question on the board? Or is that seen only by the TV viewers and the players have to listen to the question?

With Watson getting all three Daily Doubles so easily, I think that it's "interfacing" with the computer controlling the big board to get the secrets (or else it has 25 years of Jeopardy games memorized and knows the statistical distribution of DD locations).

[netmilsmom]

You have impressed me to no end!

FR has all the best people.

[Ole Okie]

I’ve been working with computers since 1955.

Turned Jeopardy off in the middle of Watson’s show.

Good old IBM. An informercial at best.

[Dark Knight]

Add to that Moore’s law that in 18 months the computer capabilities could be doubled. By the next election it would be no contest in the Jeopardy arena...just like Kasparov in chess.

DARPA did independent driver-less cars in an urban setting a couple of years ago. They were following the rules better than a lot of drivers.

Defining a true AI is difficult, but a making a substitute capable of human like actions is not nearly so. Less philosophical questions to be answered.

DK

[Migraine]

I’ll bet the Jeopardy folks will tilt the playing field with a category like “Metaphors”, or “Joke Punchlines”, or “Answers to Riddles”.

Picture a computer answering these:

“Red badge” became a literary metaphor for this wartime occurrence. (What is a wound?)

A man does this standing up, a woman sitting down, and a dog does it on three legs. (What is shake hands?)

In the childhood riddle, this is “black and white and read all over”. (What is a newspaper?)

Concepts of love, truth, beauty, justice, poetry and idiom will NEVER be fully comprehended by silicon and binary impulses.
That is our ace in the hole (to use an idiom).

[PreciousLiberty]

"Prove it."

There are independent auditors there making sure. Not sure where I read it, but I suspect you could find it with sufficient searching.

A quick Google search ;-) turned up:

http://www.dailytech.com/IBM+Supercomputer+Watson+Challenges+Human+Contestants+on+Jeopardy/article20913.htm

Watson does not have access to the Internet while playing "Jeopardy!".

[bvw]

A man in the loop supercomputer system would have done even better.

[TexasPatriot1]

So, all the answers were loaded into the hard drive before he started the game?
It then becomes an issue of accessibility.

[RFEngineer]

I saw it and a couple of things struck me:

First off, IBM wouldn’t do this if their computer was going to lose - so it’s a setup in that regard.

Second, The questions that “Watson” gets every time are excessively verbose - with lots of key search terms. What IBM has created is an “turbo google” capability.

Third, questions that are abstract in any way (like the final question) are a complete fail for the computer.

So - this is gamed by IBM for publicity. Their computer is no more complex than a search engine in retrieving answers - it just does it faster.

I also suspect the two human contestants are paid not to walk off the set for this BS sideshow.

[antiRepublicrat]

In general, open-ended questions are a bitch for a computer to answer. Chess is easy with enough computing power, just have it look so many moves ahead and factor in snapshots of all of the famous games in history, even better, all of the games of the current opponent. It’s a big problem, but it’s still closed at the end, finite.

Jeopardy can ask any question about anything in natural language form. That’s a LOT harder to program for.

[Tanniker Smith]

A key part to winning on Jeopardy is to be fast on the signal button without being so fast that you lock yourself out. That was one of the reasons Jennings had so long of a streak -- he was comfortable with the signal button and developed a rhythm.

The computer can react faster than either of them.

[KarlInOhio]

That was one of the reasons Jennings had so long of a streak -- he was comfortable with the signal button and developed a rhythm.

Ken was also very good at knowing what he should know if given a couple extra seconds of thought, so he would hit the button at the right time before he had an answer and then think for another second or two. Most players will only hit the button if they already have an answer. You could tell when Ken was doing this because most times he answered immediately, but there were a some where he waited a little before giving the answer.

[Sherman Logan]

The players, and for that matter Alex, see the question pop up on a screen at the same time as the studio and home audience. Neither Alex nor any of the staff know what it will be before this point.

I very much doubt there’s any funny stuff going on at the computer level. The studio has an entirely separate division that is super-paranoid about security and accusations of collusion.

It is entirely possible Watson or some human competitors get some up-front clues, but I sure didn’t!

[Wizdum]

Maybe we could get Watson to finish out Obama’s term for him. He couldn’t do any worse.

[PreciousLiberty]

Watson searches its store of information, not a database of "answers". It also has to "understand" the Jeopardy question, which is typically not straightforward.

Here's a quote from the NY Times:

Over its three-year life, Watson stored the content of tens of millions of documents, which it now accessed to answer questions about almost anything. (Watson is not connected to the Internet; like all “Jeopardy!” competitors, it knows only what is already in its “brain.”) During the sparring matches, Watson received the questions as electronic texts at the same moment they were made visible to the human players

It's a pretty good article actually:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig

[Lee'sGhost]

Thank you! I always wondered about that...the lock out thing and when you are “allowed” to buzz in.

That aside, people here who are pooh poohing the computer don’t understand the complexity or “reasoning” that the computer must perform. Some of the clues are simple facts that can easily been searched out by the computer. Others require a more cognitive process.

One thing they have not done yet is something like the before and after category...things where you have to combine two totally different concepts and conjoin them in a way that would never take place outside of a game like Jeopardy. I suspect the computer would totally fail those...but hope they try it tonight so we can see.