Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Jeopardy: The IBM Challenge

Jeopardy is probably my favorite show on TV.  Has been for years.  I take the online tests as often as they put them out so that I can possibly compete to be a contestant.  Those tests are hard people.  Have any of you ever taken the test?  Ever been called back to do an audition? 

How about the IBM Challenge?  What do you think about this?  For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, IBM has made a super computer of sorts to compete in the game of Jeopardy.  WATSON is the computers name.  WATSON is able to give the question to the answers that Alex Trebek reads within fractions of a second.  WATSON is competing against Ken Jennings (Winner of 74 consecutive contest of Jeopardy_ and Brad Rudder (the all high highest money maker on Jeopardy).  So this seems fair, right?  Two of the best contestants Jeopardy has ever seen matching wits with a computer?  After watching Jeopardy for the past two days (it's a three day contest) I've noticed some things.  WATSON is very quick to answer and dominated over the past two days, but he does answer wrong occasionally.  In fact, WATSON gave the same wrong answer as Jennings did just seconds earlier.  I think this artificial intelligence has a ways to go but IBM has sure showed that computers can do a lot.  A little creepy, but not quite Skynet yet.


21 comments:

  1. i been following this also this computer is legit hopefully one day i can own one in my house and it can cook and clean lol

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  2. Raagh! I've been meaning to watch this the last few days... Forgot again... ; ;

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  3. Oh no! I hope I didn't ruin anything for you. I'd still go back and watch those two episodes if you can find them online. It's interesting. They broke down one game into two days so that they could stop after commercial breaks to explain WATSON in more detail. very interesting stuff.

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  4. robots will soon control us.. if not control them remotely

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  5. Yeah, the drone will take over the world like the TERMINATOR movie... One day.

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  6. the fact that it can even compete makes this so interesting

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  7. just like deep blue? same thing different game.

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  8. Some would think so. WATSON is able to actually understand context of human speech. Like a computer might recognize the word 'bat' it had to make a guess what a bat is. Is it the animal or the wooden thing we use in baseball? WATSON can judge context and determine which meaning of 'bat' is being used in speech. I believe WATSON has been in development for over 3 years.

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  9. I gotta admit Watson is very impressive, this is probably the beginning of a machine takeover in my opinion.

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  10. once quantum computing arrives artificial intelligence will be top notch ;)

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  11. Goodness... Kind of scary. Hopefully we don't replace all humans with machines.

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  12. I for one welcome our robot overlords

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  13. @Gar Daniels: Nooo that was my line!

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  14. I was pretty impressed with his performance last night.

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  15. Very Nice ;) keep with the work
    following

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  16. Amazing what is possible nowadays.

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