Posted on 02/16/2011 7:15:29 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Mankind put up a fight in the first round, but the second round was all machine. The good news: For once, Time magazine is right. The Singularity is near, my friends.
The bad news: We all know how this story ends.
The computer brained its human competition in Game 1 of the Man vs. Machine competition on “Jeopardy!”
On the 30-question game board, veteran “Jeopardy!” champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter managed only five correct responses between them during the Double Jeopardy round that aired Tuesday. They ended the first game of the two-game face-off with paltry earnings of $2,400 and $5,400, respectively.
Watson, their IBM supercomputer nemesis, emerged from the Final Jeopardy round with $35,734.
If James Cameron ever gets bored with making “noble savage” movies about Smurfs, he should do a Terminator prequel about the evolution of Skynet. First it wins game shows, then it moves into, er, social engineering, then it comes up with Stuxnet and takes down the world’s industrial infrastructure overnight. From there, it’s only a developmental hop, skip, and jump from burly killer robots with inexplicable Austrian accents emerging from the rubble.
Two clips for you, one from yesterday’s show of “Watson” fielding sports questions and the second a longer clip about how it works its magic. Fun fact: This isn’t the first time a man’s been defeated by a machine at Jeopardy. Word on the street is that Wolf Blitzer’s so bad, he once lost to a 2-XL.
Thanks!
The ability to be good at the game is not primarily based on how much you know, but rather on how fast you know it.
Many people know a great deal, and given a few seconds of thought will come up with the right answer, possibly more often than I will.
Something odd about my brain, and if I know an answer I generally know it instantly, or not. Thinking about it for another few seconds or minutes won’t help. It’s a knack, and if you don’t have that instant recall ability you can’t learn it.
IMO.
Control of the buzzer is also a good deal more difficult than it sounds. More difficult for me than having the right answer.
I wonder if these are “random” games like the standard Jeopardy programs, or if they were specially designed for this bout.
>>Control of the buzzer is also a good deal more difficult than it sounds. More difficult for me than having the right answer.<<
I agree. When we played at home, I could never beat my mom, who was just quicker than I was eventhough I new some of the infomation better than she did.
I wondered that as well.
I’d like to see some well known, Ed “Sgt” Schultz and Pelosi be humiliated by Watson in front of the country. Add in Obama too.
But again there are some shortcuts/giveaways e.g. if the category is The Beatles and the clue is ‘Roll Up Roll Up for this...’ it’s a quick scan for text then a retrieval and the answer What Is Magical Mystery Tour?
As another former Jeopardy contestant (back in '94), I can tell you that Alex reading the question out loud isn't really that important, other than the timing of the buzzer. You can read the question on the monitor pretty much in an instant (if you're Jeopardy material in the first place), and his reading time is your processing time.
THIS, big deal.
The military will have them pretty soon, and they'll (initially at least) be physically similar to the RC robots they have now - small tracked platforms carring ARs, LMGs and/or grenade launchers.
The autonomous M1 tanks should be impressive... ;-)
Are you sure Alex doesn't have foreknowledge of the answers? The fact that he seldom trips over pronunciation of some difficult words and phrases makes me think he may have seen the answers ahead of time. At worst, he is given some of the "expected" tricky words he'll encounter.
“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.”
EXACTLY. American English in particular is chock full of idiomatic uses of words that don’t exactly or even remotely match their literal definition, which is why it’s very hard to learn as a second language without emersion. Most Americans don’t notice because we grew up using the words that way.
They’ve clearly made big gains here that can now be miniaturized and propagated. This really is a BIG deal.
Yup.
I was on in ‘98.
Nahh, they cheat all right, but not that way.
While I was on there were perhaps half a dozen squares where Alex flubbed the reading of the clue in some way.
During the next commercial break, he just re-read it and they dub it in.
I was on Jeopardy once, but was a loser. I think you’re right about the ringing in. Folks at home can’t see the neon ring around the board, but you can’t press your button until the ring turns off (after Alex completes the question). That’s why you see contestants furiously pressing their buttons, because they are “locked out”. A computer could theoretically ring in almost instantaneously.
Thanks for the education. Since the camera seldom focuses on him when he is reading the question, I would imagine it would be an easy thing to do, even after the show was over. Guess I never gave much thought to the "portions not affecting the outcome..." statement they read or show at the end of the programs.
Sure makes Alex look articulate, don’t it?
Well when you compare him to other game show hosts like Jerry Springer or the bimbo on "1 vs 100", he's a bloody genius!
During the crowd warm up, Johnny Gilbert was charming, but Alex was kind of a jerk. Someone in the audience asked if he could shake his hand and Alex said no.
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