Watson takes on "Jeopardy!"

IBM guys are LOVING this.

Love the wagers by Watson on Daily Doubles — $6,235

 

Watson missed big time in Final Jeopardy. He wasn't even in the right country with his guess.

But he kept his lead, since the wager was less than a $1000.

 

Be interesting to know how he got things screwed up on that one. Does Toronto have two airports? If so, what are their names?

 

What is an ass kicking?

 

I have been informed by a number of irate Canadians that indeed it does. Lester B. Pearson Airport is the primary, however. I have no clue how Watson even got Toronto on the radar - if you eliminate Los Angeles (which has seven airports in the metro, even though only two offer international departures) there are really only five possible answers: NYC, Chicago, DC, Dallas and Houston.

 

My guess is he only considers the question and not the category, and since the question, I believe just said "city" and not "U.S. city."

 

If that's the case, that's a significant flaw in the programming.

 

The category was "U.S. Cities" and the clue was: "Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second for a World War II battle."

IBM posted this explanation for the mistake:


David Ferrucci, the manager of the Watson project at IBM Research, explained during a viewing of the show on Monday morning that several of things probably confused Watson. First, the category names on Jeopardy! are tricky. The answers often do not exactly fit the category. Watson, in his training phase, learned that categories only weakly suggest the kind of answer that is expected, and, therefore, the machine downgrades their significance. The way the language was parsed provided an advantage for the humans and a disadvantage for Watson, as well. "What US city" wasn't in the question. If it had been, Watson would have given US cities much more weight as it searched for the answer. Adding to the confusion for Watson, there are cities named Toronto in the United States and the Toronto in Canada has an American League baseball team. It probably picked up those facts from the written material it has digested. Also, the machine didn't find much evidence to connect either city's airport to World War II. (Chicago was a very close second on Watson's list of possible answers.) So this is just one of those situations that's a snap for a reasonably knowledgeable human but a true brain teaser for the machine.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/15/watson-final-jeopardy_n_823795.html

 

Poor Ferruci, he sounds like McKittrick trying to explain why W.O.P.R was ready to launch nuclear missiles at the Soviets.

 

That reads to me as a very weak explanation for a significant flaw in Watson's programming, especially vis-a-vis interpreting contextual clues and correlation of information. Final Jeopardy categories don't get much more straightforward than the one on tonight's show, and even when the writers do make the categories more vague/cutesy, it's often because anything more specific would make the intended answer too obvious. They're not deliberately trying to mislead the contestants.

 

For what it's worth, one of Toronto's airports is named after a war hero. It's the smaller of the two airports and the hero was from the First World War, mind you.

 

Saw the show tonight. Thought it was interesting. I also think Jeopardy is a more interesting show when three human contestants are going for the championship.

Still, I applaud them for trying something different.