I very scrupulously avoided finding out how Watson did until I could watch it at work this morning. (Really, who schedules an important event for the evening of Feb 14th??) Last night was only through round 1 of the first game.

In terms of AI developments, I would say that this is a significantly more important moment in history than Kasparov vs. Deep Blue. For some reason, though, I would bet that most people would regard Jeopardy as more trivial than chess.

I’m sure the scientists can print out an image of that, but I doubt any of them would have thought to do it.

Are you saying that it doesn’t have to read the words with a video camera? Why should it have to do that? My phone can read and words from its video camera, and even instantly translate them. That’s a trivial problem compared with what Watson’s doing.

This isn’t some side-show gimmick to sell IBM computers, it is actually an incredible demonstration of computing power.

I’ll generalize my annoyance (and I recognize that this is totally irrational): Whenever I’m watching/reading anything, and it defines something that I know the definition to, I feel slightly offended. It’s as if I was talking with someone and they assumed that I did not know something that I know, and this makes me feel “This person thinks I’m stupid” or “This person is treating me as though I were a child”.

Of course, this typically happens when I’m watching reading something about a topic I know more about than do most people, and what I’m watching/reading is intended for an audience that has average or below-average (to be safe) knowledge on the topic. So as long as I stick to videos/audio/text meant for audiences as knowledgeable as I am, I’m fine… but that would restrict me to specialized content, and keep me away from most content in Time, NPR, PBS, the New York Times… even BoingBoing!

Yes, most BoingBoing posts correctly guess what words I need defined, and what words I know. But once in a while, it will define something I already know. (I would scan the latest posts but I probably wouldn’t find an example, since this only happens, I dunno, a few times a year. I’ll think about it to see whether I remember any). Funny how, when an article/video/whatever FAILS to define a word I don’t know, I never mind it or remember it, I just look up the word. So I wonder why articles/videos seem to err on the side of defining too much rather than too little.

Spoken like someone truly ignorant to the capabilities and limitations of computer science.

Yes, IBM’s been a laugh minute for a hundred years now.

Yes, the computer has to chime in with the same buzzer – and I’m certain that it is able to do so at a speed no human can match. From impulse to click is simply faster than a human being is capable of performing.

The computer -and- the human contestants know the answers to most of these questions well before that little light comes on. The issue here is the mechanics of a human being buzzing in before the computer. Still not discounting watson’s amazing ability to parse the data and come up with an answer (it’s cool) but it’s -clearly- got a mechanical advantage that has nothing to do with knowledge.

I think they would say that buzzing in first is actually a pretty significant part of the game.

Well, indeed they would, and actually Watson is pretty great at that.

Wait, which side were you debating on? Buzzing in is a task that they made Watson do, instead of letting him do it by some other means. Is the problem now that he’s too good at that?

I was saying that the task of reading words off a blue screen is superfluous to the game, and that no one would consider that an essential task in playing “Jeopardy.” Likewise, Deep Blue didn’t need to use a video camera to view the board, and instead had an electronic representation. No one complained then, because they recognized that the video camera would have nothing to do with chess.

But apparently buzzing is important, so they decided to make Watson do it, and, guess what, he’s great at it. But now making him compete on a level playing field (making him buzz) is also somehow “unfair” in the minds of many, because apparently he’s too good.

Frankly, though, I wish they had included a video camera and forced him to do OCR (which is so trivial even my phone can do it), just to prevent people from fixating on that.

I suppose the robotic technology exists to create something like a sex-bot. I wonder what the regulations on actually making and attempting to monetize one would be.

Could you, for example, pimp out a sex bot? Could you set up a brothel with a handful of them? Would you be breaking some sort of decency law against prostitution or do those laws not cover sex with “objects”?

Assuming there’s no legal ramifications, you could go simple for “Sex Brothel 1.0″…… The possibilities!

Spoken like someone truly ignorant to the capabilities and limitations of capitalism.

Then they thought which of the following;
1. What would be the most scientifically important option be?
2. What would my grandmother find cool?

None of those questions were particularly hard – I knew many of them before the actually buzzing-in is allowed (as I’m certain both human contestants did). The problem is – the game lights up a little indicator behind the podium saying when you can answer, at which point you can press the button to answer. Watson gets this impulse electronically and can chime in instantly without the laggy “eye-brain-nervous impulse-hand” loop to contend with. Without delay in his system, it is nearly impossible to contend with him on this fact alone.

The simple fact is any good jeapordy player knows almost -all- the answers before that little light fires, so we’re contending with human reflexes vs a computer’s ability to instantly respond to an electronic stimulus. While it’s a remarkable show of the computer’s ability to answer the questions, in practice it’s just showing that a computer can flick a switch faster than a human.

In this case, the playing field is particularly lopsided. Electronic signaling is faster than mechanical signaling. The set-up is categorically unfair to the humans.

As the show continues watch him closely, he’s trying to click. Every single question – you can see him clicking away with no effect. Both human players are easily able to see the question, parse it, and answer it correctly before the actual “click-in buzzer” is turned on.

Again – not discounting the amazing ability of the computer to parse the information and come up with an effective answer – but in the format of jeapordy the computer is given a HUGE advantage by the way the game works. This becomes more of a “john henry vs the track-laying machine” than a “kasparov vs deep blue”.

I liked the piece otherwise. :-)

The simple fact is any good jeapordy player knows almost -all- the answers before that little light fires, so we’re contending with human reflexes vs a computer’s ability to instantly respond to an electronic stimulus.

Wow, I really, really can’t believe so many people are using this line of argument, and are failing to understand what it is that Watson is demonstrating.

What Watson is not demonstrating is the ability to click a buzzer quickly. That’s not important.

What Watson is demonstrating is an ability — which not five years ago would have been laughed at — to come up with the correct answer within the few seconds allotted. Make no mistake, the fact that it can do this is truly remarkable. As I said, anyone with much knowledge of AI would have laughed at the idea that a computer could compete with humans at Jeopardy five years ago.

So the challenge is, can Watson come up with the answer before Alex finishes speaking? If yes, it wins the point (because it’s fast on the buzzer). If no, it doesn’t, because the humans will.

And again, note that the computer still isn’t perfect. Often it didn’t know the answer before Alex finished speaking. In those cases the humans won. But if it can work out the answer before Alex finished speaking, which is a ridiculously hard problem which hundreds of AI researchers have failed at before, then it gets to buzz in and win the points.

I do see where everyone is coming from, though. The problem now is, given that we’ve seen the computer is so good, the humans can’t win on their own merits, they can only win when the computer doesn’t know the answer. Well, tough — that would merely mean that Watson has succeeded in this important demonstration.

If you want to keep up the challenge, don’t give the computer stupid mechanical disadvantages, like making the buzzer harder for it to click. That isn’t the point. Instead, make the questions harder and harder, so that you keep pushing the dividing line between the kinds of questions a human can answer and the kinds of questions a computer can answer.

If reflexis and fairness are irrelevant, why are there two people standing on either side of the silly avatar with buzzers?

Those that want to see a fair fight between man and machine, and those that want to revel in the computer science.

Right, I got that towards the end of my big block o’ text. The AI-geek in me says that it’s great that people are complaining that the fight isn’t fair, because that means that the computer has already won.

My point at the end, though, is I think the right answer (though I don’t expect anyone ready that far). If you want to make the fight fairer, don’t mess with “silly” things like making the buzzer harder to click, or making the words harder to read. That’s like complaining that Deep Blue wouldn’t have won at chess if it had to physically pick up the pieces.

Instead, make the questions harder, so that the humans can compete in terms of raw brain power. Since we accept that there are still questions that humans are better at, start targeting those questions, and thus pushing the boundaries of what Watson can do.

In Deep Blue v. Kasparov terms, it’s like moving to Go (instead of messing with forcing the computer to pick up the pieces or use a camera).

If reflexis and fairness are irrelevant, why are there two people standing on either side of the silly avatar with buzzers?

Because that’s still the best measure of whether the computer can figure out the answer by the time Alex finishes speaking. If it can’t, those buzzers will mean that the humans will win.

Of course, i’m posting this anonymously, so my name may be Wintermute, for all you’se know. ~ring~ ~ring~

reCAPTCHA sez: breathers fascinating¹¹ (i’m not making this up)