You might be thinking, "Rod-Man, of course a computer is going to win. It knows everything!" I'm going to try to explain why it's not quite that simple. Jeopardy questions are posed in natural language, barring the odd 'form of the question' style of answer. If you ask a search engine about something, it'll tell you everything you want to know about it. However, it's not thinking. It's just matching the words you want with what it finds on the internet to give you hopefully credible sources. If your question is too difficult, you won't even get that much. Watson reads Jeopardy questions, filled with puns and wordplay, and has to pick out exactly what's important. Then it runs the keywords through algorithms and tries to find the best answer. Some Jeopardy questions just give you a description of something and the only way you know it's one thing and not another is that the category has quotations around a letter or something. The idea that a computer can answer questions like this blows my mind.
Check the video of the preliminary round below. Ken keeps up and proves that it's not impossible to hit the buzzer before Watson can. From what I've heard, when Watson gets questions wrong, he gets them very very wrong. Honestly, I'm just excited to see how it all turns out. If Watson is as brilliant as some seem to think it is, it's not long before you can ask it any question and get the best possible answer. Can you say HAL 9000? Chyeah!
My guess is that you missed the first episode tonight. Let me know if you want the breakdown.
ReplyDeleteI did miss it since I was in class but my Jeopardy obsessed suitemate filled me in. I get to watch on Tuesday though.
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