NOVA - Jeopardy Watson REMINDER it's on tonight, tuesday and wednesday

[frostedflakes]

Watson also has the advantage of encyclopedic knowledge of just about everything. They are just using the computer's strengths to make up for its weaknesses. I don't see anything wrong with the way they are doing it.

They could have done a visual reading of the clue, but all that would do is make it take a few milliseconds longer.

Basically Watson solves things in a very different manor than humans, so it is to be expected that it will do things differently.

Basically the way I look at it. From what I understand, Watson got the questions at the same time at they appear on the screen for everyone else. A computer just has the advantage of being able to process that information nearly instantly. Even if they were using a camera and OCR instead of a text file input, it would be processed much faster than the second or two it takes a human contestant to glance over and read the question.

Pretty impressive performance IMO. And DeepQA technology like this has all kinds of neat potential commercial applications.

 

[The Boston Dangler]

they need to put him online. then the real fun can begin.

ha he would get trolled almost as hard as that jessica slaughter bitch

"the consequences will never be the same"

 

[erikistired]

ha he would get trolled almost as hard as that jessica slaughter bitch

"the consequences will never be the same"

it would be funny until your computer melted from the inside out.

 

[spidey07]

some stats


I couldn't even afford to pay for the power usage !

Without responding to others the computing power and how it's setup really isn't impressive. Looks like off the shelf stuff you would get in any data center. This is all about the algorithm and programming which is what I brought up earlier and I was glad to see Ken follow my lead - go for the big money first.

This is much more difficult than running all the computations on chess.

 

[Gigantopithecus]

Without responding to others the computing power and how it's setup really isn't impressive. Looks like off the shelf stuff you would get in any data center. This is all about the algorithm and programming which is what I brought up earlier and I was glad to see Ken follow my lead - go for the big money first.

This is much more difficult than running all the computations on chess.

Watson piqued my curiosity so I tried typing only the subject, object, and verb into Google for a handful of Jeopardy answers. The correct answer was almost always one of the first hits. Whether that means Google's algorithms are impressive or that human language is mostly nuance and filler, I'm not sure, ha.

 

[spidey07]

Watson piqued my curiosity so I tried typing only the subject, object, and verb into Google for a handful of Jeopardy answers. The correct answer was almost always one of the first hits. Whether that means Google's algorithms are impressive or that human language is mostly nuance and filler, I'm not sure, ha.

Google is connected to the intarwebs, Watson is not. These days, if a computer is not connected to another computer it is essentially useless. In watson's case they are all connected to each other and nothing else and have only the clusters' basic compute resources. You can be damn sure that IBM loaded that with informational parts of the intarwebs.

This is all about algorithm and not data.

 

[frostedflakes]

Watson piqued my curiosity so I tried typing only the subject, object, and verb into Google for a handful of Jeopardy answers. The correct answer was almost always one of the first hits. Whether that means Google's algorithms are impressive or that human language is mostly nuance and filler, I'm not sure, ha.

You're interpreting the question and extracting the essential info from it, that was one of the major challenges of the project. And interpretation of the results is important as well. For example if a category is "Name the Decade" the software needs to realize that an answer should be "the 1950s" instead of "1955" or the specific year of an event listed in the question. There are a ton of little nuances like this on a program like Jeopardy, that's why it was considered the ultimate test for Watson.

Simple tasks for a human brain, so simple in fact that you probably do them without even realizing it. But stuff that comes so naturally to us can be very difficult to implement in a machine.

 

[ultimatebob]

Without responding to others the computing power and how it's setup really isn't impressive. Looks like off the shelf stuff you would get in any data center. This is all about the algorithm and programming which is what I brought up earlier and I was glad to see Ken follow my lead - go for the big money first.

This is much more difficult than running all the computations on chess.

Heh... I don't know about you, but I've never been to a data center (IBM or otherwise) that had 90 identical brand new servers installed in it.

 

[Modelworks]

Without responding to others the computing power and how it's setup really isn't impressive. Looks like off the shelf stuff you would get in any data center. This is all about the algorithm and programming which is what I brought up earlier and I was glad to see Ken follow my lead - go for the big money first.

This is much more difficult than running all the computations on chess.

It still is falling back on crunching all the data for all the possible answers and then determining what answer is most likely from all of them . Kind of a brute force approach and not at all the way a human would determine the answer. Watson doesn't actually understand the question but is processing variables till it gets the most likely one of all the possibles.



The really big system IBM is constructing that will dwarf even watson is Blue waters. Contains 300,000 cores compared to Watson's 2800. Supposed to be completed this year , the specs on it are mind numbing.
http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/system.html

 

[lupi]

if watson had net access this would be a slaughter. he could do a couple searches then use a confidence guide to compare that to what his internals came up that would be correct so often it may as well sit with his buzzer depressed at all times.

 

[Homerboy]

if watson had net access this would be a slaughter. he could do a couple searches then use a confidence guide to compare that to what his internals came up that would be correct so often it may as well sit with his buzzer depressed at all times.

The net searches wouldnt be nearly fast enough though. It's still be at the mercy of the severs which are going to be too slow to supply the data

 

[Homerboy]

Heh... I don't know about you, but I've never been to a data center (IBM or otherwise) that had 90 identical brand new servers installed in it.

Whats funny is this hardware is hardly anything to them. My nephew who worked in their WebSphere development department (he left a year ago) was basically there to set new benchmarks for WebSphere... simply to get a bullet point on a powerpoint presentation for the sales folks. Literally millions in hardware to set world records for bragging rights.

 

[a123456]

Wow, tale of 2 halves. It destroyed everyone before the commercial and then it's like they flipped a dumb down switch on it so that the match would stay close to keep things interesting. It completely died on everything after the break.

I know it has no voice recognition but it was funny to see it answer wrong with the same wrong answer Ken used.

Even though Brad has more money, I kind of felt Ken was more impressive. Brad got more money in the end but he had the 2M pot from the tourney whereas Ken had to be on his game for 74 episodes in a row. Although Brad destroys Ken in head-to-head so oh well.

 

[da loser]

how can i watch this online?

 

[lupi]

The net searches wouldnt be nearly fast enough though. It's still be at the mercy of the severs which are going to be too slow to supply the data

have you ever seen the little timer here google tells you how fast it loaded your search, now compare that to alex reading the question out.

 

[zerocool84]

I totally agree. That would level the playing field a bit. Maybe that will be the next incarnation?

Yea Watson getting the answers immediately is a very unfair advantage. If they gave Watson the answers that way it'd definitely make it more level.

 

[a123456]

have you ever seen the little timer here google tells you how fast it loaded your search, now compare that to alex reading the question out.

Google is fast enough, but it has no processing. With 15TB of data in it, it pretty much has enough raw data for any question on the show. The hard part is processing the question and parsing its raw data.

It seems to have the most issues with the most random things. It got some puns, some old english, some Lotr, but failed on the decades one miserably.

Giving it a text file isn't necessarily a big advantage. They should just stagger it so it gets the question at the time where the normal human will finish it when reading it off the board since I'm sure all the good contestants read it and process it way before Alex is finished reading it out loud. So maybe 1s into the reading, they give it to Watson. That's fair enough. However, with all the CPU power that it has, it might not even matter.

 

[blinblue]

Google is fast enough, but it has no processing. With 15TB of data in it, it pretty much has enough raw data for any question on the show. The hard part is processing the question and parsing its raw data.

It seems to have the most issues with the most random things. It got some puns, some old english, some Lotr, but failed on the decades one miserably.

Giving it a text file isn't necessarily a big advantage. They should just stagger it so it gets the question at the time where the normal human will finish it when reading it off the board since I'm sure all the good contestants read it and process it way before Alex is finished reading it out loud. So maybe 1s into the reading, they give it to Watson. That's fair enough. However, with all the CPU power that it has, it might not even matter.

That's what I'm wondering. Given more time, does it come up with better answers? So far I haven't heard anyone mention it. So I'm guessing that it probably doesn't much difference.

 

[zinfamous]

Watson has a decidedly unfair advantage in my eyes. He receives the answers via a text file as they are revealed to the other contestants. My P100 could chew through 20 words in a text file in milliseconds. Watson is off "thinking" before the contestants hear the 1st syllable.

yeah, I'm sure it's been mentioned, but I think this advantage is somewhat offset by the fact that he doesn't know what someone who guessed before him has answered, as evidenced by the blunder tonight (though plenty of humans have repeated wrong answers before--a computer shouldn't have "nerves," though)

anyway...he does have several disadvantages, but I think the fact that he can go through the answers faster than the humans get a chance to consider them is huge.

 

[zinfamous]

I think that they should have to redesign the computer to actually fit behind the lectern next time... now there is a challenge!

I thought it was interesting that at the dawn of the computing age, to be able to calculate very long strings of rather simple math, we needed a massive building to house that computing power, now that same power can fit onto your thumb.

to build Watson, the undisputed next level of "serious thinking," we have to go back (technically) and build another room-sized computer--and this one probably costs more in the cooling alone than the entire 40s-era IBM machine.

 

[zinfamous]

Watson also has the advantage of encyclopedic knowledge of just about everything. They are just using the computer's strengths to make up for its weaknesses. I don't see anything wrong with the way they are doing it.

They could have done a visual reading of the clue, but all that would do is make it take a few milliseconds longer.

Basically Watson solves things in a very different manor than humans, so it is to be expected that it will do things differently.

pshhh.

Encyclopedias are for 3rd grade reports, only.

 

[a123456]

anyway...he does have several disadvantages, but I think the fact that he can go through the answers faster than the humans get a chance to consider them is huge.

It's not really an advantage that he can go through answers faster. The human brain doesn't really work that way at the highest levels. Just like those chess machines go through tons of moves but Kasparov can beat most of them anyway since his brain works better and more efficiently.

At least with Ken and Brad, you pretty much never see them wait until the buzzer is about to ring before answering. Those guys ring in right away or not at all from the times I've seen them, at least 99.9% of the time. There was one time Ken waffled after ringing in but he still got it right.

So those guys are either waiting to ring in while Alex is reading or they don't ring in because they don't know.

If Watson really can't hear anything, it's some IBM guy on the sidelines signaling when Alex is done reading so it's pretty fair in terms of reflexes.

 

[Powermoloch]

go go watson

 

[Fear No Evil]

I was under the impression you couldn't ring in until the question as read completely.

 

[Minjin]

If Watson really can't hear anything, it's some IBM guy on the sidelines signaling when Alex is done reading so it's pretty fair in terms of reflexes.

As in every Jeopardy game, there is a light off-camera that the competitors have to watch to know when they are allowed to ring in. Watson does so with some light sensors.