I'll be recording this - I'm very interested to see how the super computer fares:
Humans had a good run: Watson to Debut on Jeopardy tonight
Today, tomorrow, and the 16th are the fateful days: IBM's Watson supercomputer will go head to head with Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in this silly, human-devised game we call Jeopardy. It promises to be some kickass TV, at the very least, and a historic event if Watson can prevail over his fleshy competition. The two matches, which are being spread over the three days, were pre-taped, so Ken, Brad, Alex and Watson already know the outcome, but they've done a pretty good job of keeping the secret so far. Hopefully they can keep mum until 7pm-ish this evening (check your local listings for a specific time).
I eagerly watched both nights and was severly disappointed because:
1. The first two nights were basically infomercials for IBM and how wonderful they are.
2. John Connor didn't time warp and make a run at Watson with a baseball bat yelling "I must destroy SKYNET!"
3. Watson didn't start playing Tic-Tac-Toe with itself.
I think Rutter (South Central PA! REPRESENT!) and Jennings would have gotten a lot closer but a lot of success at Jeopardy is your buzzing in skills. Once Jennings figured that out he came close to beating Watson the second game.
One of the bottlenecks is voice recognition. And I think Watson had a distinct advantage in that respect. It takes humans a second or two to comprehend, like: A post by Walkie....oh....it's homosexual innuendo...and/or a Cat picture... Watson was parsing the question and had thousands of possibilities before the two humans understood the question.
In terms of answers, two things I thought were funny:
1. The show displays what Watson thinks are the best three answers. For the Beatles category answer: "Bang bang" his "silver hammer came down upon her head", Watson correctly answered "Maxwell's Silver Hammer".
However, Watson's second best answer?
"Frank Sinatra"
2. Anyone could write a program that would instruct the computer, if the question category was "U.S. Cities", to NOT guess a city that wasn't in the United States.
But seriously, a 15 year-old texting on a Droid to Wikipedia could have probably beaten all three.
And in terms of the human race...well...this could be it, for us monkeys. Game over! Smoke 'em if you got 'em, turn on the black light and "Dark Side of the Moon" and wait patiently for singularity.
However, a computer will NEVER be able to cleverly make a funny "Simpsons" reference in a "Final Jeopardy" answer.
NEVER!
Brian
