IBM Watson beats human champs in first public test

[EdLee]

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

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

[apetresc]

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...

[EdLee]

That's not quite right

What exactly was not quite right? From the AP article:

Watson...edged out game-show champions... on Thursday in its first public test, a short practice round...

The actual match itself was filmed a few days later

Did they change the schedule? According to the same AP source, it was on the following day:

A real contest among the three, to be televised Feb. 14-16, will be played at IBM on Friday.

[EdLee]

Round 1 was aired today:

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

Round 2 will be aired tomorrow.

[snorri]

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.

[Dusk Eagle]

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.

[gowan]

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.

[EdLee]

Watson has huge lead at Round 2:

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

[Stable]

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

IBM Watson beats human chimps in first public test

!

[hyperpape]

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.

[EdLee]

Watson won. US$1M donated to charities.

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

[daal]

Watson won. US$1M donated to charities.

I wonder who decided that

[fwiffo]

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.

[MountainGo]

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.

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.

[EdLee]

I wonder if he'd still win if they eliminated the buzzer as a factor.

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.