Meadbh
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2006
- Messages
- 11,401
Did anyone watch Jeopardy this evening? Normally I would never spend time watching a game show, but I was intrigued by the scientific experiment. "Watson" is the name of a supercomputer that IBM has been working on for several years. IBM approached the Jeopardy team with the proposal in 2007; they wanted to build a computer that could search knowledge, judge the probability of a correct answer, and make a decision to volunteer an answer based on reaching a critical confidence level of being right. That's mostly data mining and reporting, but the neat thing is the interpretation of language cues, which are sometimes pretty complex in Jeopardy clues.
So Watson is ready, and is competing with the two top human Jeopardy champions of all time: the guy who kept the crown for 74 shows, and the guy who won the most money. Part 1 was tonight. Parts 2 and 3 are being broadcast tomorrow and the day after.
Watson (represented on the set by an avatar) gets the questions as text files. It started off in the lead. But some of the questions really threw it off and at the end of tonight's round it was in a dead heat with a human. IT was "sweating" too! Viewers could see Watson's top ranked answers and what I saw suggests to me that the algorithms on popular culture are the strongest - perhaps reflecting the age group of the engineers designing Watson! I've also heard a radio piece that suggested that Watson has demonstrated the ability to learn from the answers of the other Jeopardy players.
I got annoyed that Alex Trebek was referring to Watson as "he"; Watson's "voice" is male but that was an arbitrary human decision.
Anyhow, I find artificial intelligence fascinating.
So Watson is ready, and is competing with the two top human Jeopardy champions of all time: the guy who kept the crown for 74 shows, and the guy who won the most money. Part 1 was tonight. Parts 2 and 3 are being broadcast tomorrow and the day after.
Watson (represented on the set by an avatar) gets the questions as text files. It started off in the lead. But some of the questions really threw it off and at the end of tonight's round it was in a dead heat with a human. IT was "sweating" too! Viewers could see Watson's top ranked answers and what I saw suggests to me that the algorithms on popular culture are the strongest - perhaps reflecting the age group of the engineers designing Watson! I've also heard a radio piece that suggested that Watson has demonstrated the ability to learn from the answers of the other Jeopardy players.
I got annoyed that Alex Trebek was referring to Watson as "he"; Watson's "voice" is male but that was an arbitrary human decision.
Anyhow, I find artificial intelligence fascinating.