2011: A Jeopardy Odyssey

I saw this air on Valentine’s Day and was freaked out. A foolproof cold-wired (perhaps liquid cooled, overclocked) CPU vs. the two best Jeopardy contestants (who have emotions and probably psychologically lose as they discover how badly they are losing to a machine… as well as competing against each other human vs. human). Still… they should make WATSON physically click-in (Jeopardy is also a game of reflexes) like the other two meat-bags have to (edit: looks like it did have to buzz in).

Skynet has won, but then again I saw Feb 15th’s Final Jeopardy where they had to write in the answer and well… it ended oddly (the category was “US Cities” and it answered “Toronto????” with several question-marks losing $947 of it’s total $34K — still making 1st vs the other twos’ $5-10K). I saw on Reddit that this mosheen gets the answers right 70% compared to hu-mans getting 34%, maybe if we combine forces we will meet or exceed 100% correct answers… or would that be questions. **** Trebek! They should have used Will Ferrell’s SNL Sean Connery accent for Watson’s voice.

httpvhp://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=EB3FD7F6911027E4

From mashable:

Give it 20yrs we will all have watsons in our pockets

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A simple EMP would end any discussion of who will win…

 

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Update: IBM Watson Research Team Answers Reddit Questions : blog

‎”Questions that require a resolving and linking opaque and remote reference, for example “A relative of this inventor described him as a boy staring at the tea kettle for an hour watching it boil.”
The answer is James Watt, but he might hav…e many relatives and there may be very many ways in which one of them described him as studying tea boil. So first, find every possible inventor (and there may be 10,000′s of inventors), then find each relative, then what they said about the inventor (which should express that he stared at boiling tea). Watson attempts to do exactly this kind of thing but there are many possible places to fail to build confident evidence in just a few seconds.”