After one night of competition, Watson the computer is pummeling Ken Jennings. Brad Rutter, another past "Jeopardy!" big winner, is neck and neck with the IBM creation. Watson has racked up $5,000 worth of correct answers, as has Rutter, and Jennings is eating their dust with a mere $2,000 in his kitty.
Computers competing on Jeopardy!??? Can Skynet be far behind?
That is all.
8 comments:
Saw a NOVA episode a couple weeks back, it's really quite interesting how they get the computer to sort through possible answers and pick one that it thinks are right. But even the programmers didn't think they could ever make one that would be as good as a human. Of course, they were probably just saying that to keep the mobs with pitchforks off their lawns.
I taped it last night - and really didn't expect to have it spoiled here :)
-Wally
Killer Robot Uprising!!
Not far now...
Next up: IBM Watson vs. Emma Watson.
And Watson runs on Linux. :3
Absolutely fascinating. Seems we are on the cusp of some very exciting machine intelligence breakthroughs. This one just happens to make great television.
Speech/video recognition is not the point. The point is that Watson can come up with the correct answer in two or three seconds. The impressive thing is not so much that he won in terms of buzzing and dollar amounts, it's that he knew as many or more of the correct answers as the humans did. Not everything is in Watson's favor; when the clue Trebek reads is short, only one or two words, Watson still has to process for a few seconds before coming up with his answer. You could see this last night in the final game when Ken or Brad would already have given their answers before Watson's top three choices appeared on the screen.
Speech/video recognition is not the point. The point is that Watson can come up with the correct answer in two or three seconds. The impressive thing is not so much that he won in terms of buzzing and dollar amounts, it's that he knew as many or more of the correct answers as the humans did. Not everything is in Watson's favor; when the clue Trebek reads is short, only one or two words, Watson still has to process for a few seconds before coming up with his answer. You could see this last night in the final game when Ken or Brad would already have given their answers before Watson's top three choices appeared on the screen.
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