:smack: I mean the Current, Alex Trebek era of Jeopardy! Griffin hosted it himself in the B&W Era, correct?
Hrm. A Jeopardy! Category on Jeopardy.
Talk about being recursive.
They stated, I believe in the beginning of the show when Alex was giving the tour of the actual facility where all the hardware is stored, that Watson was not connected to the internet and so could not use it to search for answers.
They are. I’m guessing today’s game will be double jeopardy and final jeopardy of game one, and they’ll play a full game Wednesday.
As much as this may be a stunt for IBM, it’s interesting stuff. Watson struggles with the wordplay clues but he’s very good at the straight trivia and he’s essentially perfect with the buzzer. Ken’s strategy of buzzing in and then thinking up the answer was a good one, especially since he was falling pretty far behind. It’s high risk, though.
And yes, it did look weird when Watson went straight to the $800s and found the Daily Double - although that’s the worst time to get it. Has IBM explained how he picks questions? For the most part he picked the questions with the lowest dollar value remaining, but that doesn’t explain that Daily Double choice.
More appropriate than you know. This was the first song a computer was ever programmed to sing: First computer to sing - Daisy Bell - YouTube
I thought Watson’s question choices a little unorthodox also, and while it’s probably pure chance that he stumbled onto the DD when he did, perhaps he recognized some sort of pattern as to where it’s located (it does usually seem to be in the middle of a less popular category) but has a poor money management strategy (that is, digging for the DD so early in the game).
I didn’t catch the NOVA special about it so I don’t know if was mentioned there, but so far I don’t remember them having mentioning how he decides which questions to pick.
I think they would have discussed it if Watson had some kind of ability to evaluate where the DD was going to be. And if he did, it still wouldn’t make sense to go straight for it at the beginning of the game.
it was stated in the NOVA that Watson was given past answers and questions from the show. it also learns on the fly.
picking a low value in each category is a good learning strategy.
It would also be smart strategy for Watson to jump around a lot and keep his meatbag opponents off guard. There’s a lot to be said about the momentum one gets when you find a category you’re excellent at.
Lot of info here on Watson
http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/what-is-watson/index.html
It runs Linux and has 2800 processors , it does 80 trillion operations per second (80 teraflops)
I missed the NOVA show and have taped-but-not-watched yesterday’s show so forgive me if this was covered there.
Some of the early discussion in this thread are about voice recognition and how Watson doesn’t have it. My cell phone has voice recognition and I can dictate a memo to myself with (usually) better than 80% accuracy. Why couldn’t Watson have been programmed with that ability so that he could “hear” other contestant’s answers and not repeat them if they are wrong?
I guess they felt voice recognition was not a high priority so that’s why they did not do it. After all, they don’t expect too many wrong answers from those 2 guys.
I don’t know how easy or hard voice recognition is, but it’s not what IBM is trying to demonstrate with Watson. They’re trying to show off his ability to interpret the Jeopardy clue and find the correct response.
Sure it is – it constrains your working vocabulary to a massive degree. You basically set your vocabulary to who/what/where is/was/are [whatever the answer you’re considering is] and let your voice recognition software try to match to those patterns. As long ago as 15 years ago, when I did my undergraduate senior project, there were freely available APIs to do that kind of work, and they already worked pretty well.
None of Ken, Brad or Alex have strong accents or speech impediments. You could probably plug their microphones into a completely untrained version of Windows’ built in speech recognition and get the information you needed with upwards of 90% accuracy. A little custom programming, and I bet IBM could push that well past 99%.
And because the decision Watson needs to make isn’t really ‘What should I answer?’, but rather ‘Should I answer?’, he wouldn’t need much processing time at all to make the decision. It’s a simple binary choice based on the voice recognition result.
IBM could do this easily. Hell, I could write the software, or at least I could have, and very nearly did, about 15 years ago.
I think the reason Watson doesn’t have voice recognition built in is that he needs the time that Alex spends reading the clue to do his processing. If he had to spend that time doing voice recognition instead, he wouldn’t be fast enough. And building in voice recognition would build in the expectation that he would listen to Alex as well as his fellow contestants.
I think the time for incorrect answer input either voice or text would slow things to delay the buzz in after an incorrect answer, an important position for a person. the machine has to have buzz threshold confidence before going for it.
plus voice would have to be trained by the other two contestants (why would they help) and with the excited expression of giving the answer any prior normal voice training would be of no value. it would be a big handicap to have that function for this contest.
it is an unlikely event and very funny.
Perhaps, but like I said, I didn’t watch the NOVA special so I don’t know if it’s something they covered yet or will tonight, if at all.
His knowledge base was built, in part, by feeding him gobs of past episodes so it’s possible that he’s observed a pattern of probability for locating the DDs on his own and understands that they’re valuable toward winning, but doesn’t grasp how to best use them to that end.
Just a WAG. It probably was just nothing but luck.
if it had a strategy to find the daily double that would be smart. assuming you would beat the pants off the humans, it has an impressive early lead, the daily double would be the only way for the humans to catch up. find it and eliminate it.
i am not a game show viewer except seeing some when others are watching and these three episodes, so my thoughts may have little value.
The other possibility is he recognizes that just as important as getting and taking advantage of the DD yourself is not having your opponent get it and max it out. Plus, if you get it early, you lower your own risk of gigantically blowing it by betting high on a question you don’t know.
Why couldn’t they have given this thing its own timeslot somewhere? When I get off work and turn on the DVR, I want regular old Jeopardy, and not this, or College Jeopardy, or Kiddie Jeopardy, or Senior Jeopardy…
Watson evaluated appropriate answers for the specific clue, but inappropriate for the category.
Like the ‘Answer’ under the category ‘Beatles People’
“And anytime you feel the pain, Hey” this guy "Refrain, Don’t carry the world upon your shoulders’’
The correct ‘question’ of course, is “Who is Jude?” and Watson got it correct, but his #2 option was ‘‘Sad Song’’ and #3 option was “Make it better”. #2 and #3 options are lyrics from the song and clearly does not into the “Beatles People” category.
Yeah - but neither #2 or #3 would have made the threshold for buzzing in, so it doesn’t really matter - and they probably were extremely low because he knew they didn’t fit the category. He KNEW it was “Jude” with one of the higher confidence ratings of the night.