IBM's Watson beats 2 human Jeopardy! champions today in its first public test:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110114/ap_ ... vs_machine

That's not quite right; what was shown was just a "practice round" that consisted of less than half of a real game of Jeopardy. The actual match itself was filmed a few days later (in secret), and unless there's a leak, nobody will know the result of that match until it airs on February 14th.

Still, if what was displayed during the practice round was any indication, the actual result won't be too different...

_________________
The road to wisdom? Well, it's plain, and simple to express: Err, and err, and err again; but less, and less, and less!

What exactly was not quite right? From the AP article:Did they change the schedule? According to the same AP source, it was on the following day:

Round 1 was aired today:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110215/ap_ ... vs_machine

Round 2 will be aired tomorrow.

Oh, for a second I didn't see it was off topic. You had me scared there. I know the day will come when Go is ruined by computers. I'm just hoping to have a little more time.

If computers can play Go better than humans, does that automatically ruin it for you? Go is too big to likely ever be solved by pure computation¹, so you needn't worry about that.

_________________
We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

The real success of Watson is the language processing involved in "understanding" the topics and the "answers". The search and database lookup is standard stuff and not remarkable. For humans the language processing is the more-or-less trivial part, we're just slow at database lookup.

Watson has huge lead at Round 2:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technol ... und-2.html

Every time I see this in the "view unread posts" I read it as !

It's what we are--the human type of chimp .

I seem to recall there being a biologist or primatologist who referred to us as the third species of chimpanzee.

_________________
Occupy Babel!

Watson won. US$1M donated to charities.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110216/ap_ ... g_jeopardy

I wonder who decided that

_________________
Patience, grasshopper.

I wonder if he'd still win if they eliminated the buzzer as a factor. Top-level Jeopardy is mostly about buzzer timing. There is a light that comes on in your booth when Alex is done reading, and if you buzz in too soon you get locked out for half a second. If all the players got to answer all the questions, I'm not sure Watson would as many correct as the humans.

_________________
KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

I think you hit it on the nose. On most of the questions I saw Ken Jennings trying to buzz in and trying to hide his frustration when the haX0ring bot beat him over and over.

How do you mean? I thought they built a mechanical buzzer for Watson so Watson had to buzz just like all the human contestants.
The same buzzer rules applied to Watson, too.

Pan Narrans, the Storytelling Chimp.

_________________
a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

Watson's relay presumably operates at whatever speed electrons in a current can move, which is relatively close to c. That would be much faster than human reflexes.

Watson's mechanical solenoid finger has better reflexes than a human finger. That doesn't tell us anything about AI - just that we can build mechanical things that are better than humans at some tasks, which we already knew.

I'm suggesting that you could ask every clue in the format of Final Jeopardy, where all the players answered and the buzzer isn't a factor. That would be a more interesting test of its language understanding and answering ability.

_________________
KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

A built in delay of around 0.1 sec. seems reasonable to me.

_________________
The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Yes, this is nice. Like finding the correct komi. They'd have to do some experiments to find out the correct delay.
Perhaps they had already added a delay?