Really, the buzzer controversy could have been easily avoided if they just progammed into Watson that he can't buzz in until X number of seconds. So in a sense, you give the two human players a head start so they can actually read and comprehend the question before Watson rings in. That way it could have really been a competition between what a human can comprehend vs. what a computer can, rather than a competition between who can process information faster.
Really, the buzzer controversy could have been easily avoided if they just progammed into Watson that he can't buzz in until X number of seconds. So in a sense, you give the two human players a head start so they can actually read and comprehend the question before Watson rings in. That way it could have really been a competition between what a human can comprehend vs. what a computer can, rather than a competition between who can process information faster.
On Jeopardy, you can't buzz in until the last word of the question is read. If you try to buzz in early, you get locked out for a couple of seconds, in which someone else will buzz in before you. The only advantage that Watson could have is having a slightly faster reaction time (and trust me, Jennings and Rutter both have a lightning quick reaction time to have won the money on Jeopardy that they did).
On Jeopardy, you can't buzz in until the last word of the question is read. If you try to buzz in early, you get locked out for a couple of seconds, in which someone else will buzz in before you. The only advantage that Watson could have is having a slightly faster reaction time (and trust me, Jennings and Rutter both have a lightning quick reaction time to have won the money on Jeopardy that they did).
slightly?? hells no, average human reaction time i just over .2 of a second. Watsons is almost instantaneous, its not even close. The only chance the people had to buzz in was if they fluked out guessing when the light to buzz would come on, if Watson didn't reach the answer threshold or if the clue was short enough the humans could read it before watson had finished running his search algorithms.
slightly?? hells no, average human reaction time i just over .2 of a second. Watsons is almost instantaneous, its not even close. The only chance the people had to buzz in was if they fluked out guessing when the light to buzz would come on, if Watson didn't reach the answer threshold or if the clue was short enough the humans could read it before watson had finished running his search algorithms.
.1 seconds vs .2 seconds, is slightly, yes. But probably more like .05 of a second vs .08-.1 seconds for guys like Jennings.
The difference is likely only a few hundreds of a second.
But that wasn't the point of what I wrote. The point is that you can't buzz in before the end of the question is read. Doing so will likely mean that someone else will get the question. There isn't "seconds" of difference between Watson and the humans. Hundredths of seconds at most.
"Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman."
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"Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It's very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman."
Except for Andy's wife (links courtesy of the Conan thread)
It is the natural language interpretation that is astonishing. Not the fact recall.
I was thinking about this last night. In the case of Deep Blue (the chess playing computer), they spent a lot of time building up its opening book of moves, basically teaching it all the various opening permutations by hand.
Watson, from what I can gather, used the NLP stuff to simply devour huge amounts of text to develop its relationships between subjects and facts. I wonder how much Watson's handlers had to groom the data associations it was building as it went through the text being fed to it.
My take on it is that the entire language parsing system should essentially be looked at as a human machine interface, albeit potentially the most useful and important HMI ever, once it is perfected. It's still a very long way off from passing a Turing test; answering queries correctly is a very long way off from being able to construct and understand the flow of a natural human conversation. Although many people over the last 50 years have pointed out that the Turing test isn't the be-all and end-all of artificial intelligence; having an AI that can be mistaken for human isn't nearly as useful a breakthrough as having an AI that is unmistakably machine but understands natural language queries perfectly.
Like sclitheroe says, Deep Blue basically overcame the chess-playing problem through a massive opening book and sheer processing power, which is sort of unfortunate because it didn't represent a massive leap forward in AI. Any problem that has a finite solution can simply be solved with advances in memory and processing speed. Language is much more interesting because it's essentially an infinite problem. No matter how much data a computer has access to and how fast it can query that data, understanding language in a meaningful way will still be an amazing feat of AI programming.
How does Watson know when Alex has finished reading the question?
Also, was very impressed with how Ken's timing seemed to improve vs. Watson.
As mentioned earlier after alex finishes a question a little light comes on to tell the players they can buzz in now, buzz in before and you get penalized so it prevents guessing.
As mentioned earlier after alex finishes a question a little light comes on to tell the players they can buzz in now, buzz in before and you get penalized so it prevents guessing.
Watson can't see, so it must be sent a signal when the light turns on.
(links courtesy of the Conan thread)
