This is going to be, for lack of better words, epic. On a personal level however, it's a reminder of how truly wondrous the future is.<p>When Deep Blue beat Kasparov I was a kid in an Italian high school, trying to explain to disinterested fellow students why that was a big deal.<p>Not even in my wildest dreams I would have imagined to be working for the company that made that and this event possible, in a different country than my own.<p>Sorry for the slightly off topic comment, but I just wanted to remind everyone that the future can be a beautiful and surprising time if you stick around long enough to witness it.
I've been working on the periphery of this project for about a year now (my company created the on screen "avatar" that's shown at Watson's podium on stage) and it's been amazing to watch as Watson has progressed.<p>Some of the early matches I got data from were downright funny. Lots of nonsense answers and weird correlations that kinda made sense but made it obvious Watson didn't really understand the problem space.<p>In case you're interested the avatar gets realtime data from Watson and visualizes both Watson's internal state and the game state. The core bit is a collection of "threads" that swarm around the surface of a sphere. The speed, variability, color, and length of the threads are all tied to the data we get from Watson. The colors roughly correspond to confidence, and when the threads bunch up it has to do with what Watson is "doing" (i.e. if he gets an answer wrong the threads will go slow and gather to the bottom of the sphere, if one of the other contestants is answering the threads will gather on that side of of the sphere, etc).<p>The designer and my team agreed early on that there would be exactly 42 threads. ;-)<p>Oh, and when Watson speaks the threads push off the surface of the sphere to the intensity of the audio. It also makes a subtle glow in the center of the sphere brighten in an homage to Hal.
Humanity is closing in on building machines to pass the Turing Test. Watson beat both champs in the demo round a few weeks ago and I fully expect him - yes, him - to beat them in the match coming up. I can't wait to watch this live. What an epic moment in the process of moving slowly from weak AI -> strong AI.<p>Watson can do amazing NLP (and presumably Machine Learning), which is something that the general public perceives as straight up "AI". NLP has been lagging far behind expectations for decades, but with Google's new Translate apps and Watson competing on Jeopardy, it seems like NLP is pretty close to being fully solved.<p>Very exciting. Very, very exciting.<p>Edit:<p>> Eventually the machine will prevail.<p>This sends chills down my spine.
One interesting observation, which I don't intend in any way to diminish the significance of this achievement, which I think will be seen as one of the most important milestones in the development of computer science, is that today there is so much information on the web that even Google with it's non-NLP algorithms can "almost" answer Jeopardy questions.<p>There is an archive of past Jeopardy questions here :<p><a href="http://www.j-archive.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.j-archive.com/</a><p>Try choosing a question and typing the category + the clue verbatim into Google. I've tried this a few times and in most cases the correct answer was in the top couple of sites (usually in the summary text on the Google search page).<p>Of course there's still the problem of actually extracting the answer from the page and presenting it in the proper form.
A lot of geeks' girlfriends are going to be disappointed on 14th (aka Valentine's Day, in case you're wondering ;) ), as they huddle around a TV like schoolgirls watching a Bieber concert.
The crazy thing is that Watson is < 5 years in the making.<p>On PBS last night - <a href="http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622" rel="nofollow">http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622</a><p>The "Making Stuff" series on Nova that's been airing the last week or so is very interesting: Making Suff Smarter / Stronger / Cleaner / Smaller. Watson was first mentioned during the episode of "Making Stuff Smarter" but I guess it merits its own segment.
<i>Eventually the machine will prevail</i><p>What a great ending line. The NOVA special last night was great!<p><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth....</a>
Affordable tablets, intelligent computers, commercial space travel... it's so great to live in the future.<p>Now, won't somebody please design a viable successor to the Concorde?
engadget reported that Watson "destroyed" its human competition while others reported that humans were "taken down."<p>In reality, Ken Jennings was beaten on the final answer.<p>I'm interested in seeing whether Watson has an "aggressiveness" algorithm that allows it to respond before the answer is fully spoken. Humans have an advantage in this regard because it goes right to the heart of intelligence. If the game boils down to reaction time, Watson will probably win.
NYTimes had 'Play against IBM Watson' interactive feature few months back.<p>Here's the link:
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/16/magazine/watson-trivia-game.html?ref=magazine" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/16/magazine/watso...</a>
I've looked around a bit but couldn't find any information on how the game state and clues are input to Watson. Are they typed in on the fly? Pre-loaded and just revealed as clues are selected? Is it parsing speech and reading the board visually?
I am intrigued by Watson. NLP is definitely something that has failed to live up to its billing so far. I will be very interested to see what kinds of questions Watson is good at and which he tends to miss, to see if there are any patterns there.<p>Going forward, the other real questions will be: is Watson overfitted to the problem of solving Jeopardy questions, and how practical is the technology? The former is a real risk to the general applicability of Watson's technologies, the latter is a question of who can afford it. The article mentioned on commodity hardware, Watson takes about 2 hours per clue. They only achieve reasonable response times by using about 3000 cores. That limits the potential audience.<p>Either way, I'm very interested to see what happens next week. I watched the demo videos on YouTube and it was quite cool.
Won't Watson have a significant advantage on the final Jeopardy question where time is not nearly as much of a factor? If it can just keep pace for most of the game and then bet it all on that last question, it should be no contest.
Seems unfair for the humans.<p>Wouldn't a more fair match be a series of individual 1-on-1 matches with Watson and Jennings / Rutter?<p>The current configuration means the two humans will both share the questions that are naturally difficult for computers, but Watson will dominate all the questions naturally hard for humans.<p>Alternatively, to make it fair, we would need a 2nd copy of Watson competing, and if the two Watson's buzz at the same time, randomly pick one to answer.
I think it would be cool to see IBM's creation versus a creation from Google versus (a person or another machine), although I doubt another company would want to make such a risky move. If Watson wins, huge PR win; if Watson loses, still a pretty big PR win.
> When the software was run on a lone 2.6 GHz CPU, it took around 2 hours to process a typical Jeopardy clue -- not a very practical implementation. But when they parallelized the algorithms across the 2,880-core Watson, they were able to cut the processing time from a couple of hours to between 2 and 6 seconds.<p>That is an impressive amount of parallelism! This is very back of the napkin (and I realise I'm comparing apples and oranges), but a rough estimate for the time taken if the problem was parallelised with 100% efficiency would be:<p>(2 hours) / ((2880 * 3.55) / 2.6) = 1.83098592 seconds
Here's a fascinating overview of how Watson (DeepQA) works:<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc</a><p>The video goes into some detail, and looks at how Watson analyzes particular questions.<p>It feels like AI is starting to become what people once thought it could be.
There's a problem with statistical significance given that the match consists only of two games:<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Does-IBM-Watson-Jeopardy-match-contribute-to-ignorance-about-statistics" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Does-IBM-Watson-Jeopardy-match-contribu...</a>
I wonder whether Watson 'reads' the question or if the questions are fed to it directly as parameters, or if it has to 'listen' to the spoken words and start thinking about its response after that.
We don't need to know math anymore because of calculators, now we don't need to know facts anymore because of watson.<p>I guess from their shift to broadcasting opinions that the "news" outlets saw this coming...