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.
I was on in 98 and they had recently moved to a new set in Culver City. Quite impressive, actually. The seating for the audience is kind of cheesy, though. Looked a bit like the bleachers at the homecoming game.
1)All three contestants can probably answer 80% of the questions, so it's all about the buzzer.
2) The buzzer is all about rhythm. If you get in the groove, you're hard to beat.
On my show, I was winning most of the game--blowing through whole categories in the first round, doing the "True Daily Double"-- but at the end of the second round I crashed and burned between another Daily Double and a high-dollar question where I just blurted out something stupid. I finished the round in third, but it was very tight--just a couple hundred bucks between all three. But these were the days when the other places didn't get money, only prizes, and second prize was an ugly bedroom set. So I bet it all and lost. I was pissed at myself, but the contestant coordinators were thrilled because I'd played the game well from a makin' TV point of view.
The funny thing is that, while I used to watch the show religiously, muttering the answers to myself until my wife harassed me into trying out, I'll bet I haven't watched it ten times since. It just doesn't interest me at all. It's not like I hold a grudge or anything. I think it's that watching the show is about fantasizing that it's you, and once you've done it, that fantasy is gone.
BTW, Rocky Schmidt, the guy who was one of those who selected me for the show was Alex's "personal assistant" at the time. Now he's the executive producer. Nice man. Very flamboyant.
Yeah, I wondered about the button pushing too, that’s a really big part of the show.
A fair challenge would be if the computer programmers spent the same number of man hours preparing this piece of metal and plastic as the human contestants spent preparing themselves.
After four years of work the IBM people were actually able to teach Watson learn on the job. He learned from his answers and also from the answers of the other contestants. Spooky. Like others have noted, the nuances of our language is not something that can easily be taught, it's almost something one has to grow up with.
In that light, it's a little comforting to realize we all know more than we think we know simply because it has become second nature to us, like the mangling we often do to the language.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.