[design219]

IBM computer to compete on 'Jeopardy!' with two of game show's best contestants | Technology | Los Angeles Times



This might be interesting to watch, but there is no way a computer could handle the twisted way Jeopardy questions (or answers, rather) are given. The puns, and puzzle construction is just not something a machine can suss out well. IMO.

It will be interesting to see what the odds makers do with this. I'd put my money on the humans.

[finboy]

Originally Posted by design219 

IBM computer to compete on 'Jeopardy!' with two of game show's best contestants | Technology | Los Angeles Times



This might be interesting to watch, but there is no way a computer could handle the twisted way Jeopardy questions (or answers, rather) are given. The puns, and puzzle construction is just not something a machine can suss out well. IMO.

It will be interesting to see what the odds makers do with this. I'd put my money on the humans.

Me, too, because of the structure of the questions.

Anyone who doubts the kick-ass ability of a machine should play DOOM on the Ultra-violence or whatever level and get back to me. It's all in the structure of the query.

If that query is chasing you down while throwing fireballs, you might forget to tell Trebeck to suck it.

[osiris]

We meet again, you loggerheaded tickle brain poppycock!

[olePigeon]

IBM just needs the categories to cover the following subjects: sex, alcohol, dancing, native americans, and gambling. Ken Jennings will be screwed.

[SpaceMonkey]

Final Jeopardy category: Global Thermonuclear War.

[Laminar]

http://forums.macnn.com/89/macnn-lou...7/ibms-watson/

YouTube - IBM and the Jeopardy Challenge

[Laminar]

Originally Posted by olePigeon 

IBM just needs the categories to cover the following subjects: sex, alcohol, dancing, native americans, and gambling. Ken Jennings will be screwed.

Ken had no problem running the Potent Potables category after studying drinks for a bit.

[Stogieman]

"I'll take anal bum covers for $200."

[design219]

Just a heads up, this starts tonight.

Or is everyone sick of Watson by now?

[The Final Dakar]

If I remember, and I can find it, I'll probably watch.

[design219]

Computer ties human as they square off on 'Jeopardy!' - CNN.com

Day one, the humans are holding on.

[design219]

Watson has neater handwriting.

[The Final Dakar]

I forgot.

[SpaceMonkey]

Watson clearly had an advantage in timing the buzzer. If I had been either of the human contestants, I would have chucked my clicker at Trebek halfway through the round.

[osiris]

I'll take Jap anUS relations for $200.

But I didn't watch as well.

[The Final Dakar]

Not to minimize the impact of what's happening here, but I'd be jaw-droppingly impressed if he could do this via speech recognition.

[osiris]

Put Watson on Battle of the Network stars, then we'll see who is smart.

[The Final Dakar]

Originally Posted by SpaceMonkey 

Watson clearly had an advantage in timing the buzzer.

How does he know when he's allowed to buzz in? My understanding from years ago is you can't buzz in until Alex finishes reading the question.

[andi*pandi]

Anyone find the episode online? Hulu has season 1 jeopardy and not much else!

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by The Final Dakar 

How does he know when he's allowed to buzz in? My understanding from years ago is you can't buzz in until Alex finishes reading the question.

The way it works on Jeopardy is that at the exact moment that Trebek finishes the question, a person off-stage pushes a button that releases the players' clickers. If one of them times it wrong and buzzes too early, they are locked out for some fraction of a second (this is what is happening when you see one of the players having a spaz attack with their clicker). With Watson, because it can't hear the question, when that person pushes the button, a signal is sent to Watson to tell it that the question has finished being read, which effectively releases Watson's "clicker." Therefore, I get the impression that Watson has a serious built-in advantage because A) it is impossible for it to buzz in early and thus it never experiences that penalty and B) it knows exactly when the clickers have been released and thus can time its response perfectly every time. This latter advantage is, I think, subject to the delay in its own processing time, so perhaps on the harder (for Watson) questions it takes it a fraction of a second longer.

[The Final Dakar]

Yeah, that's evil.

[olePigeon]

My dad had a coworker who was on Jeopardy back in the 80s. Being an engineer, he noticed the clicker relays were daisy chained (the game's mechanics have obviously since been changed.) He got second place, and swears to this day that the clicker on the player's right was slower than the two on the left. He wasn't the only one who'd been on the show in the 80s to make this claim.

[The Final Dakar]

Jeopardy: IBM's Watson almost sneaks wrong answer by Trebek

Watson then must push a physical buzzer to answer questions, just like its human competitors. While this would seem to be a task at which computers would have an overwhelming advantage, Welty noted that Rutter was so well-known for his lightning fast buzzing that the producers weren't even mildly concerned.

Well that's interesting.

[ort888]

I watched this and it was pretty creepy. I have a feeling that in as few as 10 years from now we'll be able to ask our cell phones any question and have the answer spoken back to us instantaneously.

It's going to an interesting future, that's for sure. But we always knew that, didn't we.


Anyway, Watson definitely did have a big advantage buzzer wise, but this isn't really supposed to be a fair fight.

[The Final Dakar]

Yeah, I guess it highlights an old flaw in the game. Watching people spam the buzzer is boring.

I wonder what Watson's correct answer % is compared to humans. If it's significantly higher, that's where the buzzer advantage becomes the deciding factor.

[ort888]

What's the punishment for a wrong answer? The dollar amount of the question?
Does the person choosing the category get a buzzer advantage?

I don't watch jeopardy...

Every time I started thinking the computer had a buzzer advantage I remembered what it was doing behind the scenes... I mean, that thing is reading bizarro jeopardy questions, and deciphering them on the fly. That alone is insane to think about.

[The Final Dakar]

Originally Posted by ort888 

What's the punishment for a wrong answer? The dollar amount of the question?

Yes.

Originally Posted by ort888 

Does the person choosing the category get a buzzer advantage?

No.

[SpaceMonkey]

Originally Posted by ort888 

What's the punishment for a wrong answer? The dollar amount of the question?

Yes. The amount is subtracted from your score if you answer incorrectly.

Does the person choosing the category get a buzzer advantage?

No.

[SpaceMonkey]

Dakar beat me to the buzzer.

[The Final Dakar]

Elementary.

[voodoo]

YouTube - "Weird Al" Yankovic - I Lost On Jeopardy

I lost on Jeopardy. Baby. OOOOOOoooOOOooooo!

[Brien]

Originally Posted by The Final Dakar 

Not to minimize the impact of what's happening here, but I'd be jaw-droppingly impressed if he could do this via speech recognition.

Me too. I suppose that would be the next logical step. If they can get that working, we'll probably automate the service industry next.

[The Final Dakar]

Watching this right now, and it's awful. Ability to answer correctly aside, all this is showing is how much an advantage he has in buzzing in.

If they want to make it interesting, they either need to add lag/hesitation into the buzz in, or have all the players answer each question (Final Jeopardy style).

[The Final Dakar]

And yes, it's an IBM infomercial as well.

[design219]

Results? I couldn't watch it.

[iMOTOR]

IBM really should have waited until WATSON had speech recognition.

[The Final Dakar]

Originally Posted by iMOTOR 

IBM really should have waited until WATSON had speech recognition.

Speaking completely out of my ass, I'm not sure you'd have to go that far. If you could create a program to recognize the end of questions based on cadence and inflection (without actually understanding what was said), perhaps that'd liven things up.

Originally Posted by design219 

Results? I couldn't watch it.

I think Watson missed two questions, only one of which he buzzed in for (and everyone else missed as well).

But seriously, if you made this a contest of who could buzz in first, I don't see how the humans could win. Based on that, the contestants are basically there for window dressing, and the game is a farce.

[Laminar]

Has this been posted already?

IBM’s Watson Trivia Challenge - Interactive Feature - NYTimes.com

I beat him 31-20.

[The Final Dakar]

There was a convincing facsimile of Watson on Conan last night.

[andi*pandi]

I won, 47-12. Yay historic clothing.

Link to Conan:
http://video.teamcoco.com/video/cona...f=sharethisUrl

[Oisín]

I lost 23–19. Then again, how the hell am I supposed to know which company (that I’ve never heard of) owns two other companies I’ve never heard of? And I don’t even know what regular modern clothings are called, much less historical ones. They need to make more different ones, instead of just the one set of questions.

Jeopardy seems to be a lot different in the US than over here.

[The Final Dakar]

This really is Skynet.
Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide

Thankfully, perhaps, Watson isn't fail-proof: it can find many simple questions baffling. This is in part because the software relies heavily on finding text that looks like the right answer to a question. As a result, it misses out on information that is too obvious to have been written down. Not only that, but Watson sometimes thinks that fictional characters are real, says Gondek. It once named the first woman in space as "Wonder Woman".

It's like a little kid.

[andi*pandi]

I thought the before/after ones would be hard for a computer (they were for me) but no problem.

[anthology123]

Originally Posted by ort888 

I watched this and it was pretty creepy. I have a feeling that in as few as 10 years from now we'll be able to ask our cell phones any question and have the answer spoken back to us instantaneously.

It's going to an interesting future, that's for sure. But we always knew that, didn't we.


Anyway, Watson definitely did have a big advantage buzzer wise, but this isn't really supposed to be a fair fight.

I'm not sure we will be there that soon. Watson's specs (from Wikipedia):

Watson is a workload optimized system designed for complex analytics, made possible by integrating massively parallel POWER7 processors and the IBM DeepQA software to answer Jeopardy! questions in under three seconds. Watson is made up of a cluster of ninety IBM Power 750 servers (plus additional I/O, network and cluster controller nodes in 10 racks) with a total of 2880 POWER7 processor cores and 16 Terabytes of RAM. Each Power 750 server uses a 3.5 GHz POWER7 eight core processor, with four threads per core. The POWER7 processor's massively parallel processing capability is an ideal match for Watsons IBM DeepQA software which is embarrassingly parallel (that is, a workload that executes multiple logically-independent threads in parallel).

If we can pack that firepower into a hand-held in 10 years, that will be amazing.

[The Final Dakar]

I'd be curious how close we are to the raw power of Deep Blue today.

[ort888]

It doesn't have to be in our phones, our phones just have to be connected to it.

[The Final Dakar]

'Watson' crashed often during 'Jeopardy' taping | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

They revealed that Watson's performance wasn't quite as slick as it might have appeared in the precious few minutes of screen time we were offered.
Indeed, according to Bicks, Watson had serious performance issues.
"He crashed a bunch of times," he said. "It took over four hours to tape the show--most of the delays were due to crashes."
Though I know every game show has its pauses, glitches, retakes, makeup snafus, and sneezes, it does seem that the presentation of Watson's smack-down performance of last night hides a brittle constitution.

That must have been a lot of fun for the meatbags participating.

[iMOTOR]

Despite reports, Watson did not crash during 'Jeopardy' taping | Technically Incorrect - CNET News

Correction at 12:04 p.m.: After this story was published, we heard from PBS producer Michael Bicks that it was not, in fact, Watson that crashed during the show's taping. He would like to make clear the following: "I missblogged last night--It was not Watson, but the system that was the interface between Watson and the Jeopardy computer, completely separate from Watson, that crashed during the taping."

[The Final Dakar]

Jesus, what the hell does that even mean?

[osiris]

So there was another computer involved...