Watson Wins Jeopardy Contest

NicknamesAreStupid writes "The word is in, Watson beats the two best Jeopardy players. Sure, it cost IBM four years and millions of dollars and requires a room full of hardware. In thirty years it will all fit in your pocket and cost $19.99. Resistance is futile; you will be trivialized."

As ken said:

[Dayofswords]

I for one welcome our new computer overload.

Who's the real winner?

[wandazulu]

What I mean is, what IBM products will be the beneficiary of the tech they developed to make Watson; DB/2? WebSphere? You've gotta think that the IBM execs only agreed to go forward with this whole thing with some thought to being able to leverage it in other products.

Personally, I've love to think this was a "pure research" thing, but I doubt anyone really does that anymore (though I hope I'm wrong).

Re:Buzzer speed.

[JMZero]

Uh - Watson obviously, obviously had a speed advantage. On today's episode there were many, many obvious answers (obvious to me - to Ken Jennings or Brad Rutter, blindingly - stupidly blindingly - obvious). Watson got almost all the obvious questions, and many times you could see the little eye roll of frustration from Ken and Brad.

On questions like this, Ken and Brad would have been waiting and trying to time the ring in (they would have known the answer long before the buzzer was active).

They lost almost every time.

So while the computer may not have had an absolute advantage (ie. if Ken could have rung in within milliseconds of the buzzer being active he would have been OK) it's clear it had an effective one in that it's a bloody machine that can ring in very quickly after the buzzer is active. I mean, yeah, it's cool that the computer knows the answer that fast - but we didn't get to see anything of a comparison of who knew a greater percentage of answers.

And, again, this was absolutely, obviously clear to anyone who watched the show. I don't believe anyone could have watched the show and not realize this. Honestly, this is a problem even without the computer. Between high level contestants, buzzer speed is going to determine the winner 9 times out of 10 - the Jeopardy questions just aren't hard enough to distinguish between the best competitors. Oh, and somewhere else in this article someone said "that's part of the game". That's true. But it's a stupid part of the game - and it makes it impossible to compare competitors with different brain technologies in any interesting way.

Time to disassemble Watson

[DNS-and-BIND]

Just like when Deep Thought won against Kasparov, there can be no rematch. The project will be scrapped, the computer must be disassembled, and hence never compete again. To do that would jeopardize all the progress that's been made. What if someone were to find a weakness and exploit it? There would be a lot of red-faced developers.

Wrong answers

[Lev13than]

I thought the wrong/skipped answers were much more illuminating than the right answers.

For example, much has been made of Watson's "Toronto" answer to the US Cities question in Game 1. However, it wasn't a terrible answer because one of Toronto's airports is named after a war hero (Billy Bishop, the WWI fighter ace who shot down the Red Baron), and the main airport (Pearson) was named after a politician who was also a WWI veteran. Watson knew that Toronto wasn't in the US, the war was wrong and neither were named after a battle, but Toronto was the least wrong of all its options so that's what it chose. If this question had come up in the regular rounds Watson would have skipped (as happened occasionally). However, it needed to answer so it went with the best available option.

Now, since Watson would certainly have had data on O'Hare, Midway and Chicago in its database, the problem was either in the question parsing or the search heuristics. One suspects that its weakness is the linking together of disparate data, and it's quite likely that humans will retain this edge for some time.

Re:Fast on the clicker

[demonlapin]

It's an important part of the strategy of the game, though, unless you want every question to be Final Jeopardy. This is actually most interesting in team-based competitions. When I was in high school, we had a pretty specialized Quiz Bowl team: one "twitch" guy for the ones everyone knew, one history buff, one science and math, and one slow-but-deep who would never ring in first but who knew every obscure topic.