Watch IBM's Watson On Jeopardy Tonight 293
JohnMurtari notes that the media hype machines are massively promoting tonight's battle between Jeopardy champions and a super computer. Yes it's a PR stunt. But I imagine the actual research probably had a lot of interesting problems to address. Anyway, you can learn about IBM Watson if you're interested. I'm sure the most amusing bits will be on YouTube about 30 seconds after air time.
Re:Not sure why people are knocking it (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried to explain to the wife how amazing it is. She isn't technology illiterate, in fact I'd say she's well above average, but she just didn't see what was so impressive about it. People don't understand that there is an enormous gap between being able to retrieve general information on a subject and being able to answer a specific question. In their minds computers have been doing 99% of this for a good decade now; closing the last 1%, even if it is arguable the hardest percent, just isn't that cool to anyone outside of CS.
Re:Yes, Thank Turing We're Not the Media Hype Mach (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, they are hyping it for more than it's worth, but there's one thing here worth hyping: the fact that IBM still runs a state-of-the-art computer science research program. Just about every other corporation has gutted whatever research institute they had and concentrated their R&D funds on directly marketable products. IBM still runs the Watson research center that develops ideas from basic computer science down to products, even if it takes more than a decade to do it and the results are not certain. That is certainly worth respect.
Re:Yes, Thank Turing We're Not the Media Hype Mach (Score:5, Interesting)
Publicity fumble: Why not do it live? (Score:4, Interesting)
The show that will air tonight has been filmed weeks ago, for no good reason that I can think of. They would definitely stir up more attention and attract more viewers if the show was broadcast live. This is like being told months after the fact that Deep Blue did in fact beat Kasparov, and the moves were 1. Kp3, ... That would have been completely lame.
What IBM hopes for is for Watson to win, but not win by much, so that people aren't put off by its brutality. And this taping of the show weeks ahead of the airing just invites speculation that the game was rigged to produce exactly this result. After investing so many resources in Watson, it's pretty dumb of IBM to not do this last thing right - which would have greatly raised the interest without any additional cost. One imagines that they did this because of their lack of confidence in Watson's performance. And that makes them look far less badass than they otherwise would.
Re:Yes, Thank Turing We're Not the Media Hype Mach (Score:4, Interesting)
"What would be a good definition artificial intelligence that wouldn't be subject to goalpost moving?"
When the AI starts chiming in on where the goalpoast is, and giving us suggestions, I think then we can hang our hats and go home as a dying species.
Re:Yes, Thank Turing We're Not the Media Hype Mach (Score:4, Interesting)
You have to understand the semantic meaning of an error in computing. An error is something that is generated by an implementation upon the failure of a test at some level of the system -- it indicates the system has entered a state where further inputs will no longer map to the "desired" outputs. The issue is in how we define "desired," and we find that this is always defined semantically by the humans designing the system, a priori. A computer cannot divide a number by zero, or dereference a null pointer, because we say so, because we apply that abstract truth to the system. We do so because hardware and software form an entity that requires internal consistency to respond to inputs, and when that internal consistency is lost the system no longer is useable.
Humans make errors all the time, it's just that we do not generally halt when we make them. We have other ways of reconciling errors, things we call "rationalization" or "denial" or "learning." Human beings have very limited a priori desired outputs and exception states, and none of them apply to symbolic reasoning -- a coma might be an example of an exception state, and it's brought about by "recoverable device failures." The human brain and cognitive system is also much more finely engineered and rigorous than a computer system, inputs and outputs are always "sane," the states of the system, such as they are, are highly distributed in time and between functional units, and on most levels of operation the global system cannot lose internal consistency in a way that jeopardizes operation.
Well, the Nova ScienceNow that directly preceded the Watson episode [pbs.org] was all about animal cognition (probably not coincidentally), and they had several rather unsettling demonstrations of a dog that could remember dozens of toys by name, and collect novel toys given nothing but the novel toy's name; a parrot that could count to eight and construct declarative phrases of nouns and modifiers; and dolphins with functional vocabularies that were provably communicating with each other through their squeaks to collaborate on a trick that they invented themselves.
Most creature's brains are capable of abstraction to a degree, but the physical attributes that are associated with humanity, like the opposable thumb, bipedal walking, and particularly a voice, have the effect of creating enormous selection pressures upon the brain. A hand grabbing a pole can kill one animal a year or a hundred, depending on how smart the brain behind it wields it. It may take one individual one lifetime to teach one other individual how to make a tool, or in the same time teach ten-thousand, completely depending on how well they use speech. Because birds and dolphins and dogs can't really manipulate their environment to the degree a creature with a hand can, the selection pressures fall upon other parts of their physiognomy.
I was at a live pre-run a couple of weeks ago. (Score:4, Interesting)
At IBM "Lotusphere" event, the closing general session was a preview match. It was done as close the the same was as an actual jeopardy show but with contestants picked from a small mini-tournament of attendees, and a comedian as host instead of Alex T.
Having been present at this (and getting my picture taken next to the Watson "icon/screen") and then watching the Nova episode, I can say for sure that the Nova show was a very well done description of what happens; as well as Watson's strengths and weaknesses.
I'm not sure if they'll show it on the live TV show taping, but in the run through we saw, they showed Watson's top 3 picks with a level of confidence on each. It was as interesting to see the second and third choices as it was to see what it actually came up with for an answer.
A couple of things were updated from when they must have taped the Nova show. First, Watson was far more strategic when it came time to place bets than it had been shown on Nova. Second, it was far better at understanding weird language in the categories.
I'm looking forward to the show.