Let’s hit the streets to put Watson in the White House
I’m not impressed! It takes a room full of supercooled supercomputers to do the same as one person. Not very cost effective if you ask me.
How well would Watson do in Peking? He'd have an army of his Levono children out there working on his behalf. True social networking.
Someone should ask Watson who the hell Obama really is.
there were several easy questions that the humans knew and I could see them trying to push the button but Watson answered first. I suppose watson answers at the speed of light while humans have to push a button that is far slower and puts them at a disadvantage.
Wait till the categorey is “Women” and the clue is something like “number of ways a guy can screw up”. That’s one of those divide by zero thingies that always blow computers to smithereens.
Yes, the obligatory Skynet reference...
Watson kicked the humans’ butts today.
It even got in some mild humor.
I am thinking SkyNet...
Knowing the answers to the questions is only half the battle. What is really important is pushing the button at the right time, which brings me to my question. Does Watson activate the button mechanically, like his human counterparts?
Ask Watson if Islam is a religion of peace.
That will fry his circuit board.
"Hey Watson, your mother's a whore."
How does a computer decide how much to wager in final jeopardy? I suppose it doesn’t matter if it has doubled the other players’ scores. But what if it wasn’t? How would a computer judge its knowledge of “U.S. Cities” if, presumably, if it knows everything it knows with equanimity? I mean, it can’t say to itself, “Well, I took that calculus course sophomore year, but I didn’t study very hard, so I better not swing for the fences.”
Time to crank up, “I Lost On Jeopardy” by Weird Al! :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvUZijEuNDQ
So what’s the deal - does Watson have an internet connection and basically googles the answer in an intelligent way or does he have these facts programmed into him somehow? If it’s all internal, then that’s pretty impressive, because he would have to have an incredibly broad database of raw factual info do draw on.
He may be smart but he will never get a date . . . when they can fit watson into a container he size of a coconut, I’ll be impressed
In actuality the human contestants are squaring off against the team of coders who wrote the software. They are in no way competing against an intelligent machine of any sort.
A bright 12 year old could program the same powerful computer to play a mediocre game of checkers or a group of high-end coders can program it to play Jeopardy but the machine stays the same, it is the brilliance of the programmers that is on display.
Computers are tools, they are amplifiers that automate intelligence. They are the most important tools ever created by man.
I think they’ve allowed Watson’s buzzer timing to be too fast - it’s clear from watching that the 2 guys knew a lot of the questions but couldn’t get in first. So is it fair to let the computer buzz in every time (mechanically) as fast as the fastest human would, or should they have adjusted the reaction time?
Assuming all 3 of them knew the question before Alex was done talking and tried to buzz in as soon as the buzzers unlock, yesterday did not look fair and Ken Jennings said as much on Fox this AM (but not in a whiny way).