Watson takes on "Jeopardy!"

Any chance there is a way to view these episodes without having a TV (ie. Internet stream only)?

 

For me, it makes a hell of a lot of sense. If Watson gave a strong weight to the category name, in a category like potpourri, he'd think he should only give answers about dried, fragrant plant material when in reality that's not what they're looking for -- so as a result, he just tries to make his best guess based on the information in the question.

 

I'm going to share an entry in my NCAA pool with Watson.

 

Well, humans programmed Watson, so there will, at times, be human flaws.

Still, Watson totally kicked ass in that round.

 

The machine has awesome (and instantaneous) power of recall but is not fully able to reason. The old hurdle still exists.

A lot of the show was like watching an infomercial for IBM, which was fine at first and got annoying. Too much invested (the show being held on an IBM campus) in the idea for Watson to fail.

 

Another interesting take on Watson goofing up on Final Jeopardy.

 

If you haven't read this, you're missing one of the most hilarious reads you'll have all year.

Also, Jennings made a great point about what Watson's real advantage is: the buzzer. Jennings said that "the buzzer is everything," and what Watson can do faster than the human players is have the "reflexes" to press the buzzer to answer. So the AI lesson here might not be (yet) that we can make a computer smarter than we are. It's that we can make a computer that can retrieve the information it knows faster than we can -- which may, in effect, make it "smarter."

 

I challenge Watson to a beer pong match. I'll have him/it under the table in less than an hour.

 

Your example only further proves my point that Watson hasn't learned context. If it/he understood what "potpourri" means in the figurative sense - which is part of the point of this whole exercise in the first place, to determine if a computer can parse the nuances of language the way humans do - then it's an entirely different ballgame.

Double J, correct me if I'm wrong, but Pearson airport is the busier of the two in Toronto, isn't it? It's the only one I've ever flown into.

 

Busiest by far, Lisa. Pearson processes more than 30 million passengers a year but the Billy Bishop airport is more of a municipal/regional airport and handles less than a million.

 

Yeah, call me when Rush writes an instrumental called "YTZ."

 

The upshot of this kind of technology is sequencing someone's entire DNA -- billions of units.

What is a supercomputer if not something built to retrieve highly complex information at lightning speed.