Comments on: At RPI, crowd cheers for machine as IBM’s Watson beats human competition on Jeopardy

By: EZ

EZ — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:31:38 +0000

CP, the probalem with human anticipation is if you miss it, you’re blocked out for like a second before you can buzz back in. In football terms a great DE who anticipates a snap will likely be called for offsides 50% of the time. Watson will never go offsides, so if he figures the answer out before the buzz-in time is allowed, his pure reaction time is much greater than a human’s. Alex has often commented on buzzer mechanics and states that he thinks he would probably lose a Jeopardy game if he was playing it with younger people who have an edge with reaction times.

By: cp retiree

cp retiree — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:43:57 +0000

And Toronto is ours!!

Impressive achievement, but it’s a little scary to think about how it may be applied in the future.

I also think the humans had a very slight buzzing-in advantage over Watson, in that they could anticipate the end of the question from the inflection in Alex’s voice.

By: Cihan

Cihan — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:43:27 +0000

Er, twisted?

Watson was not developed at RPI, RPI has nothing to do with it. Some of its developers are RPI alum, and that’s why they decided to hold the event at RPI.

Retinal scanning rapid identification algorithms sounds flashy, but what project are you actually referencing? Research is no secret at RPI, can you show me a reference? I don’t defend everything that the school does, and I have distaste for plenty, but you’re sounding quite Beckian here.

By: twisted

twisted — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:49:54 +0000

Maybe the spinoff will be searching the web for hints of terrorism or our public records for hints of tax evasion! RPI does much research and development under the guise of goodness, such as the retinal scanning rapid identification algorithym program.

By: xxhaimbondxx

xxhaimbondxx — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:58:09 +0000

They can definitely go away with the host now and save some dough.

By: Kingstonian

Kingstonian — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:39:07 +0000

IBM Research employee here – love the post, Kevin – and love the intelligent and civil discourse in the comments. So nice to see something other than references to SkyNet, HAL and IBM as an evil, soul crushing corporate entity.

As you well know – we love the RPI. Dr. David Ferrucci – Watson’s ‘father’ – and our director of Research, John Kelly, are RPI alums.

It’s only fitting that RPI got to watch and celebrate too. Great post.

By: A.C.

A.C. — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:19:29 +0000

Love it, great post. I agree, it was interesting (and frustrating) to have the answer and see it in Ken Jennings’ face that he had the answer, but Watson buzzed in first. I was starting to get excited when Jennings and Rutter had their run of buzzing in before Watson, but – alas!

Fascinating to watch how a computer parses human language. I’d be interested to see if they can program recognition of proper names and so forth: so Watson could say “Who is” instead of “What is.” Nuances like that must be hard to program in among all the other stuff. Or to put it in words I can understand: algorithms is hard.

Pet peeve: Watson was credited for a correct answer when it said, “What is Maxwell’s silver hammer,” when the correct answer was actually, “Who is Maxwell.”

By: Will Gilchryst

Will Gilchryst — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 19:00:51 +0000

SPOILER ALERT(S):
Mubarak has resigned; and
Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s dad.

By: EZ

EZ — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:37:12 +0000

SPOILER ALERT !!
Verbal Kint is Kaiser Soze

By: MBAMom

MBAMom — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:21:27 +0000

Kevin – You’re right, and I agree with you. Here’s the thing though – this is a blog, not a news story so the primary intent (emphasis on primary) is not to report but to provide commentary so it’s a little different. So yes, if I didn’t want to know the outcome right away I would not look at a news story. Blogs are a little different and others (take for example WSJ’s Speakeasy blog which regularly writes about TV series), put spoiler alerts on their posts.

Anyway, I digress. The entire Watson project is fascinating. It was entertaining to see Watson go up against the best players to ever have played Jeopardy. The ability to see Watson’s “thought process” by displaying the 3 top answers with probabilities was pretty amazing too. You certainly don’t get that with 3 players. To me, what the competition was about was, can a machine act like a human? On an “academic” basis, yes the machine is going win each time, but the decision to respond, and when, not to mention the little cultural “interpretations” one has to make with the Jeopardy clues, those are the true achievements here.