http://www.watson.ibm.com/index.shtml
I know kind of late news, but this is going down in the history books for sure. First computer to beat a human in Jeopardy.
I for one respect our computer overlords.
It’s not like this is the kind of thing computers try every day.
It’s a technological achievement, yeah, but just because they showed it off in a somewhat obfuscated and flashy way doesn’t somehow make it historical.
I would compare it to Deep Blue.
I can definitely remember the first time that Deep Blue beat a Chess Grandmaster…World champion… Kasparov (1997)
that WAS history… Kasparov accused IBM of cheating…lol
hmmmm chess… vs… jeopardy…
not quite the same…jeopardy is not much more than regurgitating a bunch of facts…
Chess requires much more…
I am not surprised that a computer can win in jeopardy
Just needs a big enough memory…
Well I can argue that even understanding the human language is hard enough.
Almost close to passing that test
I have seen this kind of sentiment from a lot of people. Almost none of them with backgrounds in Computer Science/engineering.
Parsing and interpreting natural language is extremely difficult. You need to understand that the fact that the computer can quickly pull up answers is not the impressive part. The impressive part is the fact that it could figure out what needed to be answered. Putting all of the worlds knowledge into a computer is trivial, telling the computer how to provide the relavent info is the interesting task.
How many times have you wanted to google something and when you actually sat down to do it you didn’t know what to type? It takes humans significant time to parse a question and decide what are the key words. Try typing a question into a search engine exactly the way you would ast an expert on the topic, odds are you wont get what you want. Ask watson and your odds are much better.
However David, this is still a long way from passing a Turing test. Parsing natural language is one thing, constructing it is an even more difficult problem.
My post was worded pretty badly - the language recognition is a historical accomplishment, but the passing of a “Jeopardy test” really isn’t…
Watching this video (~20 minutes), I would certainly say it is. You can see that early on, Watson was a terrible, terrible Jeopardy contestant. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov was noteworthy, this certainly is too. Kasparov was at least a challenge to Deep Blue, and the Watson we saw play Jeopardy steamrolled Ken & Brad. I have no doubt they could win in a match structured to confuse Watson, but I think Watson would win the vast majority of normal matches.
I’m no computer science guy, but I think it should be pretty clear to all engineers that this one heck of a complicated system. We like to reply “It’s more complicated than that” when people make suggestions about our systems they don’t fully understand. Pretty sure this one is way over my head, and I’m willing to give IBM the benefit of the doubt. They do a pretty good job of explaining why Jeopardy makes such a good test case for interpreting language in their promo video too.
Just out of curiosity Ian and Chris were either of you able to watch the shows at EMPAC and hear from the members of the Watson team that were present?
I was a little dissappointed I had graduated when I heard about that opportunity.
Unfortunately I was busy all 3 days they were in town. I heard about the results and talked with friends that went about the questions and answers asked.
I kind of regret my first post, it’s not really intended to come across the way it does.