• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Jeopardy: Rise of the Machines

CaptainCanada

CaptainCanada

Admiral
Admiral
Tonight was the first of a multi-part Jeopardy game pitting the show's two all-time greats (Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter) against "Watson", an IBM supercomputer developed for years specifically to play the game (apparently his word recognition software is considered a big deal).

The first round ended with Watson and Rutter tied at $5000, and Ken at around $2000. Notably, though, it seems Watson isn't given the incorrect answers given by his competitors (or if he is, he malfunctioned badly): for one question, he repeated Ken's incorrect answer, and otherwise he would be ahead.

Get ready for Skynet, everybody.
 
Don't think it's his word regognition software as such - he's getting the questions via text tile - it's the ability of the software to process the context of the words and come up with an answer.

Often with Jeopard the hardest part insn't the answer, it's the question and the ability of Watson to process and comprehend the question then to deduce the answer is the advancement in AI.

Of course Watson does seem to have the advantage of not have really been exposed to harry potter :)
 
I'm a bit disappointed he gets it via text. I think it would be funny if he had to figure out Trebek's stupid ass fake accents he likes to bust out. That's the true test of a Jeopardy champion, if you can stay focused through that crap. I wonder how hardcore that button pressing mechanism is, it seems like Watson can dominate the buzz-ins for the easy questions and build a solid lead. How does it work in jeopardy? The buzzers are locked out until Trebek finishes reading? Then there's a light or something that pops up to indicate that buzz-ins will be accepted? That's where Watson's real advantage comes in, it can react orders of magnitude faster than a human, and that's the least impressive part of the whole system.

Also, having only one round per episode is making the whole thing more tedious than I expected.
 
CaptainCanada said:
Notably, though, it seems Watson isn't given the incorrect answers given by his competitors (or if he is, he malfunctioned badly): for one question, he repeated Ken's incorrect answer, and otherwise he would be ahead.
Click to expand...

No, it does get fed the previous incorrect answers; that was mentioned on Nova (I think) a week or so ago as actually a crucial part of how the programmers made Watson learn the game of Jeopardy. Obviously it's not perfect, and I'm guessing that's one thing were the speed of the game works to disadvantage the computer, especially when "he" doesn't really understand the category of questions yet.

But yeah, what Yoda mentions, the quickness of buzzing in bothers me too. Yes, that's a "natural" advantage of a computer, but it's not really what Watson is about, is it? Watson wouldn't be significantly less impressive to me if he needed half a minute to find the answer every time, that's just a question of computing power but not of AI imo.

On the other hand, he wasn't always quicker than the humans. But I would like them to analyse the average reaction time of very good human Jeopardy players and implement an appropriate delay for buzzing to level the playing field.
 
I think it probably got fed incorrect answers in development, but they would need someone entering opponents answers as text in a game situation, which I assume isn't done. After all the thing doesn't process speech. The giving of questions in text form is surely automated, whereas the answer thing couldn't be.

I think good human reaction time is in the 100ms range. I did a little googling about the Jeopardy buzzer lockout, and apparently buzzing in early locks you out for 200ms after the 'buzz in light' turns on. If Watson gets a buzz in signal input directly, the only real lag is going to be its mechanical buzzer pusher. 5ms? 10ms tops?

Since the buzz in light goes on when Alex finishes reading the clue you could probably try to time it and risk the lockout, but it seems unlikely you could hit it with that kind of precision consistently.

From watching round 1 it seemed like someone other than Watson could buzz in maybe 1/5th of the time when both Watson and at least one contestant were trying, it seemed like a pretty huge advantage.
 
If I didn't toally misunderstand they do feed incorrect answers to Watson in real-time somehow; they showed an example of a category he didn't understand; I think it was something like "thanksgiving and veterans' day" and the correct answer was the month these two events are celebrated in, and at first he answered some nonsense but after a couple tries actually did connect the dots and figured out what he was supposed to say.
Maybe they only did that during training though, I don't know.

If I saw it correctly, Watson did badly on "Name the Decade", which is similar to the example they showed on NOVA in that way, and "Alternate Meanings", which obviously must be tricky.
 
Watson definitely pulling away now.

His second answer for the identity of the author of the Narnia books was Phillip Pullman, which is hilarious if you know anything about him.
 
I don't get what the fuck happened there. The category was "U.S. Cities" - that alone should define the search parametres to exclude Toronto.
 
CaptainCanada said:
I don't get what the fuck happened there. The category was "U.S. Cities" - that alone should define the search parametres to exclude Toronto.
Click to expand...

According to Wiki there are 7 places in the U.S called Toronto though none of them come remote close to being a city that's going to have two airports :)
 
CaptainCanada said:
I don't get what the fuck happened there. The category was "U.S. Cities" - that alone should define the search parametres to exclude Toronto.
Click to expand...
perhaps when watson takes over he plans to add toronto to the united states..

:devil:
bet he went oops revealed to much master plan.
:lol:
 
On the second night it was even more obvious that Watson's real advantage lies in the buzzer. Don't get me wrong; its ability to come up with answers is crazy impressive. But that's not why it's eviscerating the pitiful humans. It's faster. That's about it. And building a machine that can press a button faster than a puny earthling is far less impressive.

It might be able to lick a great player in a fair fight but we're not going to know based on these particular games.
 
^^
Buzzer or not, Watson is (almost) as good at Jeopardy as two of the best humans ever to play it, and that's impressive on it's own.
 
Roger Wilco said:
^^
Buzzer or not, Watson is (almost) as good at Jeopardy as two of the best humans ever to play it, and that's impressive on it's own.
Click to expand...

Oh it's impressive, no doubt. I just don't know why they'd give it such an obvious superhuman advantage when it's pretty tangential to what they're trying to achieve anyway. Watson's going to win this thing and it's going to lessen their pretty awesome achievement because you could argue that it's cheating.

It doesn't need the advantage. It could probably win on its own merits.
 
I wonder why Ken and Brad agreed to do this. It seems almost as if they are being used as fodder to prove "Watson" and it's coming across as a bit embarassing. Also, the whole issue with the buzzer is something I agree with, in terms of human reaction time. I will still consider Brad and Ken as the best human players to play the game after all this is said and done even though I wonder if others feel the same way now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top