IBM's Jeopardy Playing Supercomputer

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IBM has rolled out another supercomputer that plays games against humans. This time around, the game show Jeopardy is the focus of all that computing power (better than chess). Personally, would have that thing Folding like crazy for Team #33!

Today, IBM rolled out its Jeopardy-playing computer, a whiz machine named Watson that was four years in the works. In today’s demonstration match for the media Watson played against Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, the two great (human) Jeopardy champions who will provide opposition for Watson in a two-day exhibition match. That man versus machine faceoff will air in February, and carries a prize of a million dollars.
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Pretty amazing that it beat the two champs in the practice run. Hopefully this will get AI noticed and it will receive more attention/funding.
 
Yeah, saw this commercial the other day. I guess Alex Trebek is almost out of a job and Skynet will become the MC of the show.
 
Pretty snazzy that Jennings actually kept pretty close though, however

The questions were fed in plain text to Watson, but it had to wait the same amount of time to ring in as the human players did.
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This isn't quite as fair though, because the computer has time to "think" about the answer while the humans are still reading it.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Pretty snazzy that Jennings actually kept pretty close though, however


This isn't quite as fair though, because the computer has time to "think" about the answer while the humans are still reading it.
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Ever read something and thought of something at the same time?

I know I have.
 
Bah !! it had all the ans err questions (information what ever you want to call it) ! programed into the database. performing reverse look up into a massive database and constructing questions to match answers is not really much more than an elaborate search engine . Only thing ibm has proven is that computers are great at organizing and retrieving data . Exactly what they were designed for,
and they are getting better and more effective at it.

I will be impressed when they can start with few gigabytes of code study up (ie reading encyclopedias and watching media) watch that code grow to terabytes and then whoop the pants or heck even compete with a human . then we will have truly accomplished something . all this programming and programming the answers in is nothing more than what we have always had its just the databases are getting bigger and bigger.
 
chaos4u said:
Bah !! it had all the ans err questions (information what ever you want to call it) ! programed into the database. performing reverse look up into a massive database and constructing questions to match answers is not really much more than an elaborate search engine . Only thing ibm has proven is that computers are great at organizing and retrieving data . Exactly what they were designed for,
and they are getting better and more effective at it.

I will be impressed when they can start with few gigabytes of code study up (ie reading encyclopedias and watching media) watch that code grow to terabytes and then whoop the pants or heck even compete with a human . then we will have truly accomplished something . all this programming and programming the answers in is nothing more than what we have always had its just the databases are getting bigger and bigger.
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Its quite impressive how well the natural language processing is work. Jeopardy is after all not filled with black and white questions. I think that is really the whole point...not that the computer can retrieve the data but that it is able to process the language so well.
 
infect0 said:
Its quite impressive how well the natural language processing is work. Jeopardy is after all not filled with black and white questions. I think that is really the whole point...not that the computer can retrieve the data but that it is able to process the language so well.
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Especially when puns are involved (e.g. "chicks dig me" category).
 
chaos4u said:
Bah !! it had all the ans err questions (information what ever you want to call it) ! programed into the database. performing reverse look up into a massive database and constructing questions to match answers is not really much more than an elaborate search engine . Only thing ibm has proven is that computers are great at organizing and retrieving data . Exactly what they were designed for,
and they are getting better and more effective at it.

I will be impressed when they can start with few gigabytes of code study up (ie reading encyclopedias and watching media) watch that code grow to terabytes and then whoop the pants or heck even compete with a human . then we will have truly accomplished something . all this programming and programming the answers in is nothing more than what we have always had its just the databases are getting bigger and bigger.
Click to expand...

It's misleading to say the answers (or jeorpady questions) are programmed in, as if it were a giant look up database, watson does not know the answers that jeorpady gives before hand, afaik. That would be a pointless demostration if it did.
 
Kasparov vs Deep Blue & now this. Only goes to show that if we ever do develop meaningful machine intelligence/AI it will be some kind of aspie type idiot savant, which tho limited, might not be such a bad thing.
 
Wait what are the restrictions for this thing? Does it have to have a database or can it access remote resources? Couldn't it just be a really good google searcher?
 
From the web sites about the computer, it looks like it's pure offline access. They fed it a bunch of different databases like encyclopedias and other general knowledge. Then, it reads the question and tries to figure out the right answer from all its data.

I didn't find an exact number on how big its storage is, but I imagine it's huge.

The hard trick to it is probably the natural language processing, which is one of the harder problems out there, but it looks like they've completed the task so it's beating mostly everyone now. It just faces a different problem from humans, who have a much smaller database to recall from but have better parsing skills.
 
One of the big challenges and tests for AI is the ability to process natural language, and this is the likely the main point of this exercise. The Jeopardy thing is just the case they are using to pursue this and likely chosen due to not just its ability to test this but also no doubt due to the popularity of Jeopardy.
 
Natural language processing and using brute force to draw on a huge database of information -- not what I'd want to play in Trivial Pursuit.
 
The language processing is impressive. (figuring out what the question really is)

It knowing the answers....not as impressive.
 
if this thing succeeds it'll be the next step towards super smart compilers that will know what we meant when we screw up a line of code so it'll be all kosher in the end :D
 
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