IBM's Watson Beats Former Jeopardy! Champs in Practice Round

[Tharic-Nar]

We posted a couple of months ago about the computer that would become the first to compete on the popular quiz show Jeopardy!, and as the episode is set to air on February 14th, we're getting close. At the time of our last post, we mentioned that the computer, IBM's "Watson", was practicing with prior Jeopardy! contestants, but at that time, the results were unknown.

You can read the rest of our post and discuss here.

 

[Optix]

I still call shennanigans on this.

How do you program into a machine how a person accesses thoughts? How does it have reflexes, either fast or slow to hit the buzzer?

You have a database of available answers programmed in and the only way I can see it having artificial intelligence is to program some sort of variance. The machine is wrong X% of the time, speed on the buzzer is Xms +/- Xms.

DOES NOT COMPUTE!

 

[Rob Williams]

AI is not new... this just happens to be a super-advanced version. As soon as it can calculate the answer, it hits the buzzer... it doesn't seem that difficult ;-)

Finding the answer wouldn't be instant, because it needs to calculate its complex algorithms first in order to make sure that the answer is going to be correct.

I am not saying it's perfect, but it's not made out to be.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

Yeah, they created the 'Jeopardy!' API to help it out, lol.

$60-$100 million in hardware and R&D (guessing...) to win $4,400 in game cash, lol.

 

[Rob Williams]

Yeah, they created the 'Jeopardy!' API to help it out, lol.

$60-$100 million in hardware and R&D (guessing...) to win $4,400 in game cash, lol.

The ultimate goal isn't to win a game show... it's to prove what this thing can do.

 

[Kougar]

Yeah, but I certainly would rather deal with a semi-intelligent, sophisticated program than these stupid, preprogrammed canned scripts that try to pass themselves off as live chat help. Hell, for that matter I might prefer Watson to some actual live people...