Jeopardy, Watson, and General Wtfery

[Man_of_Squid]

I'm watching this jeopardy with IBM's sinister sounding computer, skynet. No, wait, I meant watson.

What do you guys think of this? I myself can only think of one thing OH MY GOD, ROBOT APOCALYPSE RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!!

 

[theothernavi]

Yeah, it is pretty insane. But this just shows how much technology is advancing. Wait, if Watson wins, where the heck does all the money go?

 

[Man_of_Squid]

IBM gets it. But there's not much they can do with it. It already cost millions of dollars to make watson.

 

[TheGreen]

I don't understand the purpose. Yes, they've managed to cram 15 TB (ZOMG!!) of RAM into this computer, and it has a really big database of knowledge, but what it's come down to is spending waaaaay more money than they won just so that a machine piston can press the button before Ken Jennings and Brad what's-his-face can even you can clearly see them trying to press the button.

Dislike! The computer isn't really playing Jeopardy, imo.

 

[00steven]

You could see Ken Jennings getting frustrated because everytime he pressed the button it was always to slow, because the robot did it automatically. The only time they got to go was when it spit out some crazy answer and they got to respond.

 

[theothernavi]

Well, IBM, gets it. That makes perfect, yet no sense whatsoever. Seriously, IBM already gets God knows how much money.

 

[Man_of_Squid]

IBM didn't do it for the money. IBM already has money. It's all about proving a point. When Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, people started started saying that abstract decision-making wasn't what made humans better than machines, it was the ability to use and understand language. So IBM responded by making a computer that could understand sentances and solve complex word problems. IBM is trying to prove that computers can & will become smarter than humans.

 

[theothernavi]

That makes a heck of a lot more sense.

 

[Ronald74]

If I were to ask "do you want fries with that", could it answer me with a definite answer?

 

[Petman1325]

IBM is trying to prove that computers can & will become smarter than humans.

I wouldn't exactly say that, because as we proved with the U.S. Cities question, in which we have learned that Quebec is now a major U.S. city. Honestly, IBM did this to prove that computers could, at one point, think like humans. Technically, Watson just knew what any other Jeopardy contestant would know, it is just that Watson could press the button faster. The average human takes about 0.3 seconds to react to something, whereas Watson could take only 0.03 seconds, depending on how far away Watson is from the room playing Jeopardy.

There is one thing that Watson could never understand that humans can, and that would be emotion. No sort of artificial intelligence can understand human emotion or learn the way we do. Watson technically was only force-learned how to recognize letters, then given a bunch of books and articles to look over and try to digitize itself, then given over 20 different algorithms to let it decipher human language. Besides, IBM said that what they're going to do with the money is donate it to charities. I mean, that computer cost well over $1 Million (USD), so if they were to keep the money for themselves, it wouldn't fill much of the gap.

 

[pokemonclub]

I really wanted 2 c it but I missed it.