MORE WATSON.
Good overall summary of the whole experience, from IBM’s perspective.
IBM's Watson almost sneaks wrong answer by Trebek →
Watson also tripped up on an “Olympic Oddities” question, but so imperceptibly that Alex Trebek didn’t notice at first, raising an important point of clarification. After Jennings answered incorrectly that Olympian gymnast George Eyser was “missing a hand,” Watson answered, “What is a leg?”
Welty said Trebek initially accepted Watson’s answer, but the taping had to be stopped and the sequence reshot because Trebek had forgotten that Watson wasn’t aware of the context created by Jenning’s answer.
If a person had answered the Oddities question the way Watson did, they could have been presumed to be following the context of Jennings’ answer, with the “missing”-ness of the leg implied. But since Watson couldn’t have heard Jennings, its answer of “What is a leg?” rather than “What is missing a leg?” was actually deemed incorrect. In the aired version of the episode, Trebek declares Watson’s answer wrong.
Bug lets humans grab Daily Double as Watson triumphs on Jeopardy →
Sorry, I’m totally on a Watson binge.
Watson begins every round looking for Daily Double clues, because they are crucial to progress in the game. After one filming pause in the first round when Watson had been made to stop and then pick up again, Welty said Watson began again thinking the Daily Double had already been found. So it stopped looking for the clue, allowing Jennings to find it first.
Humorous article by Ken Jennings, who was able to graciously admit defeat in regards to his man-vs-machine standoff.
I expected Watson’s bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match: The computer’s techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson’s case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words. It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels “sure” enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy! player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing.
What Is I.B.M.’s Watson? →
It’s a long article, but it’s pretty awesome. At least watch the video. :x
For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because it would allow machines to converse more naturally with people, letting us ask questions instead of typing keywords. Software firms and university scientists have produced question-answering systems for years, but these have mostly been limited to simply phrased questions. Nobody ever tackled “Jeopardy!” because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.
With Watson, I.B.M. claims it has cracked the problem — and aims to prove as much on national TV. The producers of “Jeopardy!” have agreed to pit Watson against some of the game’s best former players as early as this fall. To test Watson’s capabilities against actual humans, I.B.M.’s scientists began holding live matches last winter. They mocked up a conference room to resemble the actual “Jeopardy!” set, including buzzers and stations for the human contestants, brought in former contestants from the show and even hired a host for the occasion: Todd Alan Crain, who plays a newscaster on the satirical Onion News Network.
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Over the rest of the day, Watson went on a tear, winning four of six games. It displayed remarkable facility with cultural trivia (“This action flick starring Roy Scheider in a high-tech police helicopter was also briefly a TV series” — “What is ‘Blue Thunder’?”), science (“The greyhound originated more than 5,000 years ago in this African country, where it was used to hunt gazelles” — “What is Egypt?”) and sophisticated wordplay (“Classic candy bar that’s a female Supreme Court justice” — “What is Baby Ruth Ginsburg?”).
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