The IBM supercomputer named Watson has beaten two Jeopardy! champions in a three-night marathon. The computer was awarded a $1 million prize, but the BBC reports that “the victory for Watson and IBM was about more than money. It was about ushering in a new era in computing where machines will increasingly be able to learn and understand what humans are really asking them for. Jeopardy is seen as a significant challenge for Watson because of the show’s rapid-fire format and clues that rely on subtle meanings, puns, and riddles; something humans excel at and computers do not.” With his final answer, Ken Jennings, one of the human competitors and the winner of 74 consecutive Jeopardy! shows (a record), wrote, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” [%comments]
It's Official: The Computer's Smarter
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This Watson scares me.
I always thought the reason for choosing Jeopardy was that the things which make it hard for humans – syntactic gymnastics and lots of irrelevant information – are things which it is easy for a computer to ignore.
As a concrete example from the show in question: you had to read an entire screenful of waffle to realise the question was actually: “Find a sport named Modern ________”. A computer that was merely looking for important nouns wouldn’t have to worry about the waffle at all.
Most of the questions I have seen from this program seem to fall into the “what word links these two words” category of IQ test question. Again, simple if you have a nice big database to search.
I don’t know if this is a new devopment. We have had the capability of building machines and computers with superior specialist abilities for a while now.
If you really want to impress me, build a computer that laughs at my jokes or cries during a sappy movie, and doesn’t necessarily knows why.
Computer was faster. Don’t recall the human champions offering “Toronto” as a US city.
No, the computer is faster.
The competition was absolutely geekalicious!
What most people don’t realize is that Watson was fed the information electronically. So by the time Alex finished reading the question Watson had already recieved it seconds ago and already had the answer. So it wasn’t a fair fight. In order for it to be fair, Watson needs to be able to read or understand speech. If the players were able to get the questions seconds in advance they could probably search the internet and come up with the correct answers too!
That’s computer’s brain is no match for our big sticks and heavy rocks!