"You don't want to know what machines did to your mother last night, Trebek!"
The final jeopardy question last nite was what U.S. city....
And HAL said Toronto.
Watson should have had to actually *listen* to the question, parse it, figure it out, *then* press the button and answer.
The way it was run it got the question in a digital instant while the humans had to wait while Alex read it in a few linear seconds. No matter how you slice it there is a bias towards the computer in that setup which allowed Watson to ring in more quickly than the humans.
They didn’t have a chance, even though Watson got a lot of answers wrong.
In the end it was a pointless exercise. Recognition and retrieval is what computers do and the individual(s) who prepped the machine all but admitted that the only variable would be the timing of the buzz-in.
The Jeopardy! puns are a) usually lame and b) dead giveaways so claiming that the computer would need some sort of powerful A.I. to decipher them was spurious at best.
Jeopardy obtains all its questions from one encyclopedia.
How is this impressive when the computer just simply acts as a high speed reader?
I'm there.
Not the computer. The program that drives the computer.
Dumb...
Time to execute Spork Weasel!!!!
As a one-day Jeopardy champion, I have some insight on this issue.
For me and a good many other contestants, the most challenging part of the contest is not knowing the right answer. It’s ringing in at the right time.
You have to buzz in after Alex talks speaking and be the first one to do so after the little light up behind him goes off. If you buzz in before the light goes off, your button is locked out for half a second, which is an eternity under the circumstances.
Obviously a computer is always going to beat human reflexes at this game. I don’t know how they arranged the “buzz in” for Watson, but it has at least the potential to give the computer a huge advantage that has nothing at all to do with knowing the right answer.
Great story line - but here's the problem. Computers don't have the human desire to dominate. You have doubts? Ask the computers who won Jeopardy if they 'enjoyed' the game. You won't even get a blink.
And this whole concept is interesting why?
NOVA Smartest Machine on Earth
When Watson was trying out for the show the host kept making fun of his responses when he got it wrong and the programmers took it very personally. "Why does he have to ridicule Watson?"
So, Watson has access to Google while in play.
That’s cheating.
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.
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).
A man in the loop supercomputer system would have done even better.
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.
The computer can react faster than either of them.
Maybe we could get Watson to finish out Obama’s term for him. He couldn’t do any worse.