Psyched About Watson?

[Amaris]

What wasn't clear to me was the buzzing mechanism. It seemed that Watson beeped in electronically, rather than have a robotic hand and clicker attached. Since it takes a few fractions of a second to push a button, the humans seemed to be at an unfair disadvantage

It seems like there were a few times in tonight's episode where Watson had an answer he was really confident in, but the others managed to buzz in first, so if Watson has an advantage, it's not much of one.

This was a pretty interesting event. Congrats to IBM for developing a computer system able to compete on Jeopardy and to the Jeopardy producers for letting this event take place.

Agreed on all counts. It was also easy to watch the stats and see where Watson had a 96/97% certainty rate and was still too slow to buzz in. Seemed fair enough to me.

Oh yeah, one last thing: I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.

That was hilarious. That, and the bunny ears at the end.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

I just watched that Nova special and it was pretty impressive when it didn't really understand the category but by analyzing the correct answers from the other contestants it deduced how to answer the final question in the category.

It will be interesting to see if this pattern recognition where the machine forms many of the patterns itself can be applied to other data streams.

 

[starfox]

To answer seriously, IBM plans to donate any winnings to charity, and both human contestants have pledged to donate half of their winnings to charity as well.

Jennings would probably also tithe 10% to the LDS church. So, technically, 60% for him.

 

[J.T.B.]

Pretty interesting. Watson made some mistakes, but some of the question language that it parsed correctly was very impressive. The ring-in speed seemed decisive in game 2, but was a lot closer in game 3. Really, if Watson hadn't gotten lucky hitting a couple of Daily Doubles it would have been a lot closer game.

Jennings would probably also tithe 10% to the LDS church. So, technically, 60% for him.

More likely 10% of his 50%.

--Justin

 

[RAMA]

Those guys looked really uncomfortable. lol

 

[Skywalker]

Day 3 was the best, Ken Jennings actually made a game out of it.

Pretty neat to watch, overall. I was pretty impressed with Watson, though obviously there's still more to be done with it. I wonder if they'll bring in a Watson 2.0 at some point in the future.

 

[siskokid888]

The coolest line, for us Trek geeks anyway, came from one of the programmers after the match. When asked the inevitable question about computers taking over, he said "look, we are not trying to make the HAL 9000. We want the computer from Star Trek. The one that you can ask for information and can get it for you, and even ask follow-up questions to get you the best information possible. That is cool". Score one more for the vision of the creators of Trek.

 

[publiusr]

If a decent search engine comes out of all this--that would be a real plus.