So I had a chance to watch all 3 on my PVR. I had seen most of the 2nd episode when it aired on Tuesday.
First, because people seem to be pretty defensive about this, I want to make it very, very clear that I am as amazed and impressed as anyone else about what IBM has been able to do here.
Watson is not connected to the internet and the fact that he can distinguish all the oddities of the english language and find the answers is nothing short of amazing. It was cool to see the behinds the scenes stuff from the first episode because it showed that this was not an easy process and took a long time.
All that being said...
This is nothing short of a, not sure what the right word is here, farce? set-up? hustle?
I'm a massive jeopardy fan and these episodes were almost unwatchable. I like jeopardy because I can play along. With Watson on the show it was almost unwatchable. He's just way, way, way too fast at buzzing in.
What I find a little silly about this and the reason I say farce or set-up is because we all know that a computer has a crazy advantage when it comes to ringing in. Computers can transmit way faster than a human. While it takes x number of seconds to ring in for a human, a computer can do it in milliseconds.
And I get that that isn't the impressive part but that is totally moot.
IBM knew they had this massive advantage of buzzer speed. The huge disadvantage was getting a computer to be able to answer Jeopardy questions.
What I don't like and what made the show totally pointless IMO is that they obviously did enough testing before the show to know that Watson was going to absolutely destroy all the competition.
And I totally get Jeopardy had it in their best interests to let Watson mop the floor with Ken and Brad but it took all the fun out of it. Jeopardy got record ratings for their recent shows which is fine and probably good for the show.
However from a Jeopardy lover the initial "wow" factor wore off after about 10 minutes. After it became obvious that the computer could answer Jeopardy questions and that it's buzzer speed was unmatchable, what's the point? I started to skip all the play and just watch the behinds the scenes stuff. Why watch if there is absolutely no doubt who's going to win and especially if everyone already knew the outcome?
It isn't like this was a surprise that Watson would win, at least for everyone involved. The behind the scenes stuff made it obvious that IBM, Jeopardy and Ken/Brad knew full well that Watson was unbeatable.
Personally I can't wait until they go back to regular shows.
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