14 ms·

IBM's "Watson" finally ready for prime-time Jeopardy

156 points by shawnee_ 16y ago

cryptoz 16y ago
Humanity is closing in on building machines to pass the Turing Test. Watson beat both champs in the demo round a few weeks ago and I fully expect him - yes, him - to beat them in the match coming up. I can't wait to watch this live. What an epic moment in the process of moving slowly from weak AI -> strong AI. Watson can do amazing NLP (and presumably Machine Learning), which is something that the general public perceives as straight up "AI". NLP has been lagging far behind expectations for decades, but with Google's new Translate apps and Watson competing on Jeopardy, it seems like NLP is pretty close to being fully solved. Very exciting. Very, very exciting. Edit: > Eventually the machine will prevail. This sends chills down my spine.
- JoeAltmaier 16y ago
  Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior. We have no more to fear from it, than from a punch and judy show. Cleverer and cleverer puppets will not become intelligent machines. A dedicated effort to build a massive neural cluster simulation might become intelligent, but it will think such incomprehensible thoughts as to be fairly useless to us (think intelligent rhododendon; what would you have to talk about?) We will know when Watson is dangerous when it feels fear, angst, want. Not just an algorithm to sort facts and simulate speech.
  - cryptoz 16y ago
    Watson is not a simulation any more than your brain is a simulation. Your brain is (likely) mostly just algorithms and data structures, albeit on an enormous scale. This could be wrong, but I'm betting not. What else could the brain possibly be? It's not magic. > We will know when Watson is dangerous when it feels fear, angst, want. Not just an algorithm to sort facts and simulate speech. Nah. Look at good science fiction to see why this is false. The most dangerous AI ever conceived might be something like Skynet or HAL 9000; machines that are cold, calculating and have no emotion whatsoever. But they do hold weapons, they do speak English and they are intelligent. I'm not suggesting we'll ever build anything like what we see in science fiction, but good writers often are able to predict - or even influence (see Clark, Asimov) - the future. Algorithms to sort facts are indeed the beginnings of machine intelligence.
    - JoeAltmaier 16y ago
      I deny that the human brain IS algorithms. It is neurons connected by dendrons/synapses. Right? Small bits of it can be algorithmically simulated. Large processes can be algorithmically simulated. But to call the algorithm "intelligence" is sympathetic magic. Algorithms work in a different way; they break in a different way; they are hard-coded so don't change. They are a simulation.
      - kls 16y ago
        No disrespect intended but, I think you are lacking a fundamental understanding of machine learning, genetic algorithms, neural networks and AI in general. I was introduced to Watson when I took a sub-project from IBM related to Watson, I had no idea what it was untill taking the contract, at which point I was introduced to Watson and it is an impressive feat, it is with out a doubt the state of the art in NLP AI. Sufficient to say, AI algorithms differ from the static and rigged structures that most developers write for business apps, web or mobile apps (even the good developers that decouple stuff), the scale of difference is orders of magnitude. In many cases machines learning has the ability to generate new code based on learning and build new connections and new algorithms to deal with learned problems. Applications literally generate new and novel applications and then connect themselves to these new nodes. This is not stuff usually broached when you just need to credit a line in an account payable or get the sales volume for last month. There is a huge gap between the code used to write business applications and the structures used in AI. This is not meant as a critique of you or anyone in general, and is not intend to belittle business app, mobile or web developers but rather to help inform people that, those who have not worked in the field of AI, that their understanding of software development has little relevance when applied to the field of AI. It is literally a different world where the concepts are totally foreign to a non-AI developer.
        arethuza 16y ago
        I think anyone who has worked in the field of AI would admit there are a lot of philosophical questions around the definition of intelligence and it's relationship to algorithmic problem solving. One of my favourite thought experiments in the area being Searle's Chinese Room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
  - ugh 16y ago
    A simulation of what? It can actually answer Jeopardy questions. As good or better than the best Jeopardy player on the planet. (We will see.) Another task, previously only conquered by evolution, now conquered by algorithms written by humans. Watson doesn’t pretend to be good at Jeopardy, it just is.
    - JoeAltmaier 16y ago
      It can simulate an intelligence answering Jeopardy questions.
      - ugh 16y ago
        It actually answers questions, no trickery involved. It might not use the same algorithms humans use to answer those questions but that isn’t really that important, nobody ever claimed it does. I don’t see the simulation. I see a machine that is genuinely good at playing Jeopardy.
    - gjm11 16y ago
      > Another task, previously only conquered by evolution I'm pretty sure that Jeopardy performance as such has not been strongly selected for among the ancestors of present day H. sapiens. (And the related things that may have been -- effective language use, good memory, etc. -- are not so obviously "conquered by algorithms written by humans" however well Watson does.)
      - ugh 16y ago
        That sentence was written for its poetic impact, not its accuracy, I think it’s nevertheless somewhat defensible. Humans were obviously never selected for playing Jeopardy and evolution didn’t in that sense “conquer” Jeopardy (like dinosaurs “conquering” flying) but evolution nevertheless produced humans which are very good at playing Jeopardy. (We know of nothing else in this universe that can even only understand the rules of Jeopardy. Except for human-built machines.) That we can build a machine which is just as good as we are at playing the game obviously doesn’t mean that this machine is as intelligent as humans, it’s nevertheless quite impressive.
  - demallien 16y ago
    And how will we know that Watson actually feels fear, or will we just get someone else saying "Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior" response? Anyway, the answer to this type of conundrum is simple and well-known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test Of course it should be noted that we aren't there yet for Watson. Even in the restricted domain of a game show, when Watson fails, it does so with a different mode, compared to humans, so we can identify that it isn't actually a human.
    - mattmanser 16y ago
      Personally I don't think the answer is the turing test, it is a limited test of intelligence. There's also no guarantee we wouldn't be able to brute force it in time, just as deep blue was mere brute forcing. Impressive technologically, disappointing intellectually. When I think of intelligence I think of intuition, creativity, flexibility and the ability to learn. The turing test is a simple test along a long path. I don't think the answer of your conundrum is simple and well known.
      - demallien 16y ago
        You don't understand what the Turing Test is all about. It isn't testing intelligence, it is an attempt to answer the question "Can machines think?". It's all there in that Wikipedia link that I posted. Also, what makes you think that what goes on in your own brain isn't just another form of "brute-forcing"? What makes one implementation of thinking "thinking" and another form just "brute-force"? And then, brute-forcing is the technique of trying every possible solution - a Turing Machine must be able to move in a near infinite solution space, so brute-forcing is not actually possible.
        Qz 16y ago
        It's really more like "Can we fool ourselves into believing that machines think?" which isn't actually any different from the question "Can we fool ourselves into believing other people think?"
        16y ago
  - adsr 16y ago
    I agree about the simulation part, does it have a sense of self? Or can pose questions to itself such as "I think therefore I am"?
- rst 16y ago
  To seem to me like a person, Watson would need more than intelligence, it would need, well... personality. Watson will answer questions put to it for as long as the power is on. But it will never do anything else. It has no other desires, no motives, no interests. Its planning skills are limited to game strategy. Its conversational skills are limited to preprogrammed social niceties which probably don't extend beyond the context of the game. You can make a decent case that it's intelligent --- but it's an intelligent machine. You'd have to add all of the above, and probably more, in order to get something that you could interact with even on-line as a person. [EDIT: I don't mean to deny the possibility of a machine that I would feel comfortable calling a person --- but I saw the Watson demo run, and I haven't seen one yet.]
- baddox 16y ago
  The thing is, Jeopardy! at a high level of competition boils down to reflexes. Obviously it's very impressive that Watson would even be able to generate correct responses a significant portion of the time, but you must realize that the two human contestants probably knew more correct responses that Watson. In the practice video, you saw Ken take off on the book titles category, probably because Watson couldn't handle the language of those clues.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  Watson is amazing, but I've known for years that it was coming. You just have to look at Google and Wikipedia to know that it was coming. Because answering trivia questions is just not the equivalent of passing the Turing test. Trivia questions are quite guessable. I played a lot of College Bowl (and its local high-school equivalent) back in my younger days. And there were many running gags about the strategy. For example, if a question contained the words "Name this artist..." there was a strictly limited set of possible answers, defined roughly as "artists whose names appear in a typical high school art appreciation class". Similarly, "name this composer" is more likely to be cluing Beethoven or Bach or Mozart than Grieg or Saint-Saens, and almost certainly not anybody more obscure than that. And Grieg is not that obscure. There were a lot of common themes: It was a good idea to memorize the names of all the Greek, Roman, and Norse gods; the names of all the types of clouds; the capitals of countries and the names of political leaders. That sort of thing. In College Bowl (unlike Jeopardy) it is legal to press the buzzer and interrupt the questioner at any point. The questioner just stops reading until you've taken your guess. And so every College Bowl geek knows a story like this: Someone accidentally presses the buzzer before the person reading the questions has said more than one or two words. So, with nothing else to do but guess, the player shouts something out. And that guess is correct. I've never seen a zero-word guess work in person, but I've seen a few two and three-word guesses succeed. Given just a hint of the topic ("this scientist...") the odds are surprisingly good. The search space is just not that large. One reason why trivia is easy is that questions that require even the smallest amount of actual thought tend to be too ambiguous for good trivia. Trivia questions are generally read, answered, and judged by people who have no actual expertise in their subject matter, so it's important that the answers be very clear and unambiguous. I used to dread the physics questions, because I was a student physicist, and I understood the questions too well. So it was sometimes difficult to avoid giving answers that were technically correct, but that did not match the one on the card.
  - andrewce 16y ago
    My college didn't have a college bowl team, but competing on high school teams and being responsible for more than a few correct two or three word answers, I can vouch for this. It's all about having enough breadth that the other bits of information presented can help whittle down answers by way of association and relationships. Good trivia players rely quite a bit on intuition. Ken Jennings mentioned (in his book) how Jeopardy! often has questions about rivers, so it was a fairly simple matter to just memorize river names and some basic associations with which to answer questions. It seems like Watson is mostly a really sophisticated algorithm on top of lots of brute force (2880 processors?!). Though I guess it could also be said that humans are just ugly bags of mostly water. That said: in something like medicine (differential diagnoses), such a system could also be extremely useful, given the frequent occurrence of a fairly limited number of "answers".
- bioh42_2 16y ago
  This sends chills down my spine. Allow me to rephrase that: Eventually the machine will better diagnose your symptoms. More accurately then a human doctor could.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    Let's see... Start with UMV technology. Add human image recognition systems, natural language processing and speech synthesis, expert system-based medical diagnosis, and, say, a built-in weapons system. I'll be in my bunker.
- TheCondor 16y ago
  Watson is completely amazing. The differences between Jeopardy and chess are staggering. I'd even say that in the chess challenge, they could kind of cheat, Deep Blue had every 5 piece board configuration in a book and so if it could play to 5 pieces left then it knew how to play from there, humans have their look up optimized differently. If this technology can be generally applied, it just seems like a radical tool, radical for medicine, law, and probably revolutionary for other professions where access to information hasn't been as important. That being said, a really really clever jeopardy playing machine just doesn't seem "intelligent" to me. Huge bounds forward, we're making progress, I'm not denying that but Watson isn't going to slurp in the works of Shakespeare and write down some original thoughts on it, comparing it to current events. Or contrast Wordsworth and Keats. Or suggest a new experiment to further identify envelope proteins on a virus. Or invent a new way to etch semiconductors even smaller than we currently are. Will we get there? Maybe, hopefully, maybe even in our life times, but this is comprehension and search, it's not inventing or creating yet. It seems like half the problem, maybe the easier half. Still awesome, maybe in a few years we'll have Watsons we can access from our phones or something.
acangiano 16y ago
This is going to be, for lack of better words, epic. On a personal level however, it's a reminder of how truly wondrous the future is. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov I was a kid in an Italian high school, trying to explain to disinterested fellow students why that was a big deal. Not even in my wildest dreams I would have imagined to be working for the company that made that and this event possible, in a different country than my own. Sorry for the slightly off topic comment, but I just wanted to remind everyone that the future can be a beautiful and surprising time if you stick around long enough to witness it.
- Alex3917 16y ago
  Reminds me of this Brad Paisley video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Yg9wjctRw&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Yg9wjctRw&feature=relat...
- meterplech 16y ago
  I love seeing this type of response. It's similar to the race to put a man on the moon. Some technology should be there to inspire.
  - jonhohle 16y ago
    Not just inspire, but push the envelope. The fallout of traveling to space not only unified the country but provided new technologies which simply had no need to be created until something as epic as landing on an orbiting satellite was attempted. These actions pay dividends unrelated to the mission at hand.
    - dmd 16y ago
      By 'orbiting satellite' I'm guessing you meant the Moon, but I've personally always been most amazed not by the moon landing per se, but the subsequent return from the surface to dock with the waiting CSM.
      - ugh 16y ago
amichail 16y ago
There's a problem with statistical significance given that the match consists only of two games: http://www.quora.com/Does-IBM-Watson-Jeopardy-match-contribute-to-ignorance-about-statistics http://www.quora.com/Does-IBM-Watson-Jeopardy-match-contribu...
- cryptoz 16y ago
  I highly doubt that IBM will dismantle the machine when they're done (yes, I know that's what they did with Deep Blue, but this is different). I'd bet that far more than two games will be played with Watson, over the next few years. Also, as pointed out in that thread, this is no different than a regular Jeopardy game. One game consists of dozens and dozens of questions. If Watson answers them all correctly and the humans get zero points, that is indeed statistically significant. If the score is close, then repetition in games will be necessary. The problem with the assumption in that thread is that one Jeopardy game is vastly different than the next. In reality, you could string together a bunch of games and call it one game. Or take one game and split it up into 50 "games". The point is, inside one game, there are enough different questions to definitely count as statistically significant.
  - amichail 16y ago
    That depends on what "better" means. If better means actually winning in Jeopardy, then two games is not enough. Final Jeopardy plays a significant role in who wins a game, so it's not just like combining multiple games into one. Even on the question level, a disclaimer should be given if Watson doesn't answer enough questions for statistical significance. Finally, the issue here is with contributing to the statistical ignorance of people watching the two game match. Sure, Watson has played many games already before the match but that's not what's being shown on TV.
- deleted 16y ago
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spot 16y ago
> Watson is comprised of 90 Power 750 servers, 16 TB of memory and 4 TB of disk storage 4TB disk? something is wrong here.
- cryptoz 16y ago
  Good spotting.
- fourspace 16y ago
  Perhaps they meant 360TB, 4TB per machine?
- deleted 16y ago
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- jimmyk 16y ago
  It's possible that it's only 4 TB. If it's only processing text and it stores a character in two bytes, that means 2 trillion characters. At a generous 8 characters per word, that's 250 billion words. There are only 560,000 words in War and Peace, which is a very long book, and 44,000,000 in the Encyclopedia Britannica, meaning you could stuff in ~500,000 of the former or ~5000 of the latter. That seems sufficient for Jeopardy.
- whatusername 16y ago
  https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/InsideSystemStorage/entry/watson_what_is_the_smartest_machine_on_earth7?lang=en https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/In... "Several readers of my blog have asked for details on the storage aspects of Watson. Basically, it is a modified version of IBM Scale-Out NAS [SONAS] that IBM offers commercially, but running Linux on POWER instead of Linux-x86. System p expansion drawers of SAS 15K RPM 450GB drives, 12 drives each, are dual-connected to two storage nodes, for a total of 21.6TB of raw disk capacity. The storage nodes use IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) to provide clustered NFS access to the rest of the system. Each Power 750 has minimal internal storage mostly to hold the Linux operating system and programs. When Watson is booted up, the 15TB of total RAM are loaded up, and thereafter the DeepQA processing is all done from memory. According to IBM Research, "The actual size of the data (analyzed and indexed text, knowledge bases, etc.) used for candidate answer generation and evidence evaluation is under 1TB." For performance reasons, various subsets of the data are replicated in RAM on different functional groups of cluster nodes. The entire system is self-contained, Watson is NOT going to the internet searching for answers. "
shawnee_ 16y ago
The crazy thing is that Watson is < 5 years in the making. On PBS last night - http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622 http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622 The "Making Stuff" series on Nova that's been airing the last week or so is very interesting: Making Suff Smarter / Stronger / Cleaner / Smaller. Watson was first mentioned during the episode of "Making Stuff Smarter" but I guess it merits its own segment.
kefs 16y ago
Eventually the machine will prevail What a great ending line. The NOVA special last night was great! http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth....
ajays 16y ago
A lot of geeks' girlfriends are going to be disappointed on 14th (aka Valentine's Day, in case you're wondering ;) ), as they huddle around a TV like schoolgirls watching a Bieber concert.
- krupan 16y ago
  I'm still trying to figure out how to negotiate this with my wife. I mean, you could record it, but then you have to try and not find out the result until you get a chance to watch it. That's tough.
ero5004 16y ago
Won't Watson have a significant advantage on the final Jeopardy question where time is not nearly as much of a factor? If it can just keep pace for most of the game and then bet it all on that last question, it should be no contest.
- teraflop 16y ago
  I wouldn't bet on it. In the "preview" round, Watson seemed to come up with its answers more or less instantaneously. (Or at least, before the host finished reading the question.) My guess is the limiting factor is the quality of the underlying dataset and cleverness of the algorithms, not CPU time.
  - andrewce 16y ago
    Human contestants are also able to see the question typed out (much like it's displayed on the television), so people are able to do this as well. I'm usually able to read any given question in about a second. Granted, I used to practice speed-reading trivia questions for an hour or so per day (one of the leagues we competed in projected questions via powerpoint), but there's at least one reason most Jeopardy! contestants are able to buzz in almost immediately on most questions.
abrenzel 16y ago
I am intrigued by Watson. NLP is definitely something that has failed to live up to its billing so far. I will be very interested to see what kinds of questions Watson is good at and which he tends to miss, to see if there are any patterns there. Going forward, the other real questions will be: is Watson overfitted to the problem of solving Jeopardy questions, and how practical is the technology? The former is a real risk to the general applicability of Watson's technologies, the latter is a question of who can afford it. The article mentioned on commodity hardware, Watson takes about 2 hours per clue. They only achieve reasonable response times by using about 3000 cores. That limits the potential audience. Either way, I'm very interested to see what happens next week. I watched the demo videos on YouTube and it was quite cool.
johnohara 16y ago
engadget reported that Watson "destroyed" its human competition while others reported that humans were "taken down." In reality, Ken Jennings was beaten on the final answer. I'm interested in seeing whether Watson has an "aggressiveness" algorithm that allows it to respond before the answer is fully spoken. Humans have an advantage in this regard because it goes right to the heart of intelligence. If the game boils down to reaction time, Watson will probably win.
- deleted 16y ago
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- senthil_rajasek 16y ago
  "I'm interested in seeing whether Watson has an "aggressiveness" algorithm that allows it to respond before the answer is fully spoken. You cannot buzz in until the question is completely read out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!#cite_note-9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!#cite_note-9
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    True. But along the same lines... I wonder if it's able to say to itself "I think I'm in the right ballpark, so I'll buzz now" and then take the 3-4 seconds it takes the host to recognize the buzz and ask for an answer, to finish its processing to get to the answer it's most confident of. In other words, it doesn't need to actually have the answer to buzz. It just needs some confidence that the answer is close at hand.
    - johnohara 16y ago
      Given the number of servers (and cores) plus 16TB of memory, 1ms is an enormous amount of time. 500ms is 1/2 a second.
    - Splines 16y ago
      I'd wager that humans do the same thing (e.g., when they have an answer and it's on the tip of their tongue)
kenjackson 16y ago
How much of the Watson code is Java?
- kls 16y ago
  I don't know the percentages but Watson is built on UIAM http://uima.apache.org/ http://uima.apache.org/ which has bits in C++ and bits in Java. From there I am sure different teams used language bindings to use the language that best suited their particular needs to accomplish their tasks. Not that I know it to be true, but I would not be at all surprised to find R, Haskel and even some lisp in their somewhere.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    Thanks for the link. That looks really impressive. For IBM this is presumably PR for their products/services. I do hope they disclose more of the architecture as I'd love to build out a system like this, even on a smaller scale (takes 6 hours to come back with an answer rather than three seconds).
    - kls 16y ago
      My understanding that this is the beginning of their DeepQA product line, my assumption is that the research and portions of the technology will be used for business insight and analytical to answer what if type questions. ,Just to be clear I don't work for IBM, and I do not know their intentions for the project, but I do take projects from IBM and have taken projects related to Watson, but I do not know their plans to monetize Watson, the former is just pure speculation on my part.
bengl3rt 16y ago
Affordable tablets, intelligent computers, commercial space travel... it's so great to live in the future. Now, won't somebody please design a viable successor to the Concorde?
- bioh42_2 16y ago
  First we need a viable airline industry any where in the world.
dstein 16y ago
Watson's voice isn't menacing enough.
- RodgerTheGreat 16y ago
  I'd settle for a decent Sean Connery impression.
- WalterBright 16y ago
  I'm sad they didn't use HAL's voice for it.
bgurupra 16y ago
http://www-943.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/ http://www-943.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/
- bgurupra 16y ago
  A classic use of watson that IBM is saying is in the field of medical science - Imagine if we can feed the entire set of medical books into watson (somebody estimated that would just take about a week for watson to process and make the connections) and then you have the watson physician's assistant which can listen into the symptoms and spit out the first five most probably causes - that would be so damn amazing!
  - nradov 16y ago
    There are already experimental clinical decision support applications which, given a list of symptoms, can produce the differential diagnosis. But they generally aren't very useful since in most cases the physician can figure out the same diagnosis just as quickly. Real medicine isn't like House, MD. IBM is more likely to apply Watson technology toward analytics and data mining. There are huge amounts of clinical data locked up in unstructured text reports. If they can analyze that data in a useful way to draw correlations between symptoms, patient demographics, medications, treatments, and outcomes then that could add a lot of value for medical researchers.
- glhaynes 16y ago
  They can win at Jeopardy but they can't build a URL structure without annoying machine/network identifiers. :)
  - bgurupra 16y ago
    that is actually my bad , this URL works too http://www.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/ http://www.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/ - basically this sends a request to the main front end proxy and because IBM hosts like a billion URLs the front end proxy redirects to the appropriate cluster
gcheong 16y ago
I've looked around a bit but couldn't find any information on how the game state and clues are input to Watson. Are they typed in on the fly? Pre-loaded and just revealed as clues are selected? Is it parsing speech and reading the board visually?
- kenjackson 16y ago
  I've heard (from Engadget) that it is given text on the fly. It does not do speech or visual recognition. But it gets the question the same time the contestants see them.
derwiki 16y ago
I think it would be cool to see IBM's creation versus a creation from Google versus (a person or another machine), although I doubt another company would want to make such a risky move. If Watson wins, huge PR win; if Watson loses, still a pretty big PR win.
mhb 16y ago
Maybe they should give it the answer "The specifications for a machine to beat you at Jeopardy."
waxpraxis 16y ago
I've been working on the periphery of this project for about a year now (my company created the on screen "avatar" that's shown at Watson's podium on stage) and it's been amazing to watch as Watson has progressed. Some of the early matches I got data from were downright funny. Lots of nonsense answers and weird correlations that kinda made sense but made it obvious Watson didn't really understand the problem space. In case you're interested the avatar gets realtime data from Watson and visualizes both Watson's internal state and the game state. The core bit is a collection of "threads" that swarm around the surface of a sphere. The speed, variability, color, and length of the threads are all tied to the data we get from Watson. The colors roughly correspond to confidence, and when the threads bunch up it has to do with what Watson is "doing" (i.e. if he gets an answer wrong the threads will go slow and gather to the bottom of the sphere, if one of the other contestants is answering the threads will gather on that side of of the sphere, etc). The designer and my team agreed early on that there would be exactly 42 threads. ;-) Oh, and when Watson speaks the threads push off the surface of the sphere to the intensity of the audio. It also makes a subtle glow in the center of the sphere brighten in an homage to Hal.
prpon 16y ago
NYTimes had 'Play against IBM Watson' interactive feature few months back. Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/16/magazine/watson-trivia-game.html?ref=magazine http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/16/magazine/watso...
- wmf 16y ago
  IIRC that does not actually let you play against Watson.
aforty 16y ago
That article is sort of bullshit. They already taped the Watson Jeopardy episodes last month, they just haven't aired them. Watson won.
- seancron 16y ago
  That was a practice round: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/ibm-watson-jeopardy/ http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/ibm-watson-jeopardy/
- trafficlight 16y ago
  Thanks for the spoiler. I didn't want to watch it anyway.
xutopia 16y ago
When the humans playing against Watson get slapped around it'll be a weird moment for humanity.
tgflynn 16y ago
One interesting observation, which I don't intend in any way to diminish the significance of this achievement, which I think will be seen as one of the most important milestones in the development of computer science, is that today there is so much information on the web that even Google with it's non-NLP algorithms can "almost" answer Jeopardy questions. There is an archive of past Jeopardy questions here : http://www.j-archive.com/ http://www.j-archive.com/ Try choosing a question and typing the category + the clue verbatim into Google. I've tried this a few times and in most cases the correct answer was in the top couple of sites (usually in the summary text on the Google search page). Of course there's still the problem of actually extracting the answer from the page and presenting it in the proper form.
RoboTeddy 16y ago
Here's a fascinating overview of how Watson (DeepQA) works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc The video goes into some detail, and looks at how Watson analyzes particular questions. It feels like AI is starting to become what people once thought it could be.
ZoFreX 16y ago
> When the software was run on a lone 2.6 GHz CPU, it took around 2 hours to process a typical Jeopardy clue -- not a very practical implementation. But when they parallelized the algorithms across the 2,880-core Watson, they were able to cut the processing time from a couple of hours to between 2 and 6 seconds. That is an impressive amount of parallelism! This is very back of the napkin (and I realise I'm comparing apples and oranges), but a rough estimate for the time taken if the problem was parallelised with 100% efficiency would be: (2 hours) / ((2880 * 3.55) / 2.6) = 1.83098592 seconds
- mcrittenden 16y ago
  What's 3.55?
  - ZoFreX 16y ago
    Oops! The cores in Watson are 3.55 Ghz, sorry. I realise that ghz is not necessarily a measure of speed, this estimate could easily be out by a factor of 2 or 3.
goodgoblin 16y ago
I wonder whether Watson 'reads' the question or if the questions are fed to it directly as parameters, or if it has to 'listen' to the spoken words and start thinking about its response after that.
leelin 16y ago
Seems unfair for the humans. Wouldn't a more fair match be a series of individual 1-on-1 matches with Watson and Jennings / Rutter? The current configuration means the two humans will both share the questions that are naturally difficult for computers, but Watson will dominate all the questions naturally hard for humans. Alternatively, to make it fair, we would need a 2nd copy of Watson competing, and if the two Watson's buzz at the same time, randomly pick one to answer.
olalonde 16y ago
Did they give him HAL 9000's voice or am I crazy?
mkramlich 16y ago
This is the right way to test AI. "Alan Turing, meet Alex Trebeck."
EGreg 16y ago
When deep blue beat Kasparov, IBM quickly moved to shut down the program. Let's hope it doesn't happen in this case, if Watson wins.
efsavage 16y ago
We don't need to know math anymore because of calculators, now we don't need to know facts anymore because of watson. I guess from their shift to broadcasting opinions that the "news" outlets saw this coming...

156 points by shawnee_ 16y ago

Humanity is closing in on building machines to pass the Turing Test. Watson beat both champs in the demo round a few weeks ago and I fully expect him - yes, him - to beat them in the match coming up. I can't wait to watch this live. What an epic moment in the process of moving slowly from weak AI -> strong AI. Watson can do amazing NLP (and presumably Machine Learning), which is something that the general public perceives as straight up "AI". NLP has been lagging far behind expectations for decades, but with Google's new Translate apps and Watson competing on Jeopardy, it seems like NLP is pretty close to being fully solved. Very exciting. Very, very exciting. Edit: > Eventually the machine will prevail. This sends chills down my spine.

JoeAltmaier 16y ago
Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior. We have no more to fear from it, than from a punch and judy show. Cleverer and cleverer puppets will not become intelligent machines. A dedicated effort to build a massive neural cluster simulation might become intelligent, but it will think such incomprehensible thoughts as to be fairly useless to us (think intelligent rhododendon; what would you have to talk about?) We will know when Watson is dangerous when it feels fear, angst, want. Not just an algorithm to sort facts and simulate speech.
- cryptoz 16y ago
  Watson is not a simulation any more than your brain is a simulation. Your brain is (likely) mostly just algorithms and data structures, albeit on an enormous scale. This could be wrong, but I'm betting not. What else could the brain possibly be? It's not magic. > We will know when Watson is dangerous when it feels fear, angst, want. Not just an algorithm to sort facts and simulate speech. Nah. Look at good science fiction to see why this is false. The most dangerous AI ever conceived might be something like Skynet or HAL 9000; machines that are cold, calculating and have no emotion whatsoever. But they do hold weapons, they do speak English and they are intelligent. I'm not suggesting we'll ever build anything like what we see in science fiction, but good writers often are able to predict - or even influence (see Clark, Asimov) - the future. Algorithms to sort facts are indeed the beginnings of machine intelligence.
  - JoeAltmaier 16y ago
    I deny that the human brain IS algorithms. It is neurons connected by dendrons/synapses. Right? Small bits of it can be algorithmically simulated. Large processes can be algorithmically simulated. But to call the algorithm "intelligence" is sympathetic magic. Algorithms work in a different way; they break in a different way; they are hard-coded so don't change. They are a simulation.
    - kls 16y ago
      No disrespect intended but, I think you are lacking a fundamental understanding of machine learning, genetic algorithms, neural networks and AI in general. I was introduced to Watson when I took a sub-project from IBM related to Watson, I had no idea what it was untill taking the contract, at which point I was introduced to Watson and it is an impressive feat, it is with out a doubt the state of the art in NLP AI. Sufficient to say, AI algorithms differ from the static and rigged structures that most developers write for business apps, web or mobile apps (even the good developers that decouple stuff), the scale of difference is orders of magnitude. In many cases machines learning has the ability to generate new code based on learning and build new connections and new algorithms to deal with learned problems. Applications literally generate new and novel applications and then connect themselves to these new nodes. This is not stuff usually broached when you just need to credit a line in an account payable or get the sales volume for last month. There is a huge gap between the code used to write business applications and the structures used in AI. This is not meant as a critique of you or anyone in general, and is not intend to belittle business app, mobile or web developers but rather to help inform people that, those who have not worked in the field of AI, that their understanding of software development has little relevance when applied to the field of AI. It is literally a different world where the concepts are totally foreign to a non-AI developer.
      - arethuza 16y ago
        I think anyone who has worked in the field of AI would admit there are a lot of philosophical questions around the definition of intelligence and it's relationship to algorithmic problem solving. One of my favourite thought experiments in the area being Searle's Chinese Room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
- ugh 16y ago
  A simulation of what? It can actually answer Jeopardy questions. As good or better than the best Jeopardy player on the planet. (We will see.) Another task, previously only conquered by evolution, now conquered by algorithms written by humans. Watson doesn’t pretend to be good at Jeopardy, it just is.
  - JoeAltmaier 16y ago
    It can simulate an intelligence answering Jeopardy questions.
    - ugh 16y ago
      It actually answers questions, no trickery involved. It might not use the same algorithms humans use to answer those questions but that isn’t really that important, nobody ever claimed it does. I don’t see the simulation. I see a machine that is genuinely good at playing Jeopardy.
  - gjm11 16y ago
    > Another task, previously only conquered by evolution I'm pretty sure that Jeopardy performance as such has not been strongly selected for among the ancestors of present day H. sapiens. (And the related things that may have been -- effective language use, good memory, etc. -- are not so obviously "conquered by algorithms written by humans" however well Watson does.)
    - ugh 16y ago
      That sentence was written for its poetic impact, not its accuracy, I think it’s nevertheless somewhat defensible. Humans were obviously never selected for playing Jeopardy and evolution didn’t in that sense “conquer” Jeopardy (like dinosaurs “conquering” flying) but evolution nevertheless produced humans which are very good at playing Jeopardy. (We know of nothing else in this universe that can even only understand the rules of Jeopardy. Except for human-built machines.) That we can build a machine which is just as good as we are at playing the game obviously doesn’t mean that this machine is as intelligent as humans, it’s nevertheless quite impressive.
- demallien 16y ago
  And how will we know that Watson actually feels fear, or will we just get someone else saying "Watson is a simulation, a clever puppet designed to mimic human behavior" response? Anyway, the answer to this type of conundrum is simple and well-known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test Of course it should be noted that we aren't there yet for Watson. Even in the restricted domain of a game show, when Watson fails, it does so with a different mode, compared to humans, so we can identify that it isn't actually a human.
  - mattmanser 16y ago
    Personally I don't think the answer is the turing test, it is a limited test of intelligence. There's also no guarantee we wouldn't be able to brute force it in time, just as deep blue was mere brute forcing. Impressive technologically, disappointing intellectually. When I think of intelligence I think of intuition, creativity, flexibility and the ability to learn. The turing test is a simple test along a long path. I don't think the answer of your conundrum is simple and well known.
    - demallien 16y ago
      You don't understand what the Turing Test is all about. It isn't testing intelligence, it is an attempt to answer the question "Can machines think?". It's all there in that Wikipedia link that I posted. Also, what makes you think that what goes on in your own brain isn't just another form of "brute-forcing"? What makes one implementation of thinking "thinking" and another form just "brute-force"? And then, brute-forcing is the technique of trying every possible solution - a Turing Machine must be able to move in a near infinite solution space, so brute-forcing is not actually possible.
      - Qz 16y ago
        It's really more like "Can we fool ourselves into believing that machines think?" which isn't actually any different from the question "Can we fool ourselves into believing other people think?"
      - 16y ago
- adsr 16y ago
  I agree about the simulation part, does it have a sense of self? Or can pose questions to itself such as "I think therefore I am"?
rst 16y ago
To seem to me like a person, Watson would need more than intelligence, it would need, well... personality. Watson will answer questions put to it for as long as the power is on. But it will never do anything else. It has no other desires, no motives, no interests. Its planning skills are limited to game strategy. Its conversational skills are limited to preprogrammed social niceties which probably don't extend beyond the context of the game. You can make a decent case that it's intelligent --- but it's an intelligent machine. You'd have to add all of the above, and probably more, in order to get something that you could interact with even on-line as a person. [EDIT: I don't mean to deny the possibility of a machine that I would feel comfortable calling a person --- but I saw the Watson demo run, and I haven't seen one yet.]
baddox 16y ago
The thing is, Jeopardy! at a high level of competition boils down to reflexes. Obviously it's very impressive that Watson would even be able to generate correct responses a significant portion of the time, but you must realize that the two human contestants probably knew more correct responses that Watson. In the practice video, you saw Ken take off on the book titles category, probably because Watson couldn't handle the language of those clues.
mechanical_fish 16y ago
Watson is amazing, but I've known for years that it was coming. You just have to look at Google and Wikipedia to know that it was coming. Because answering trivia questions is just not the equivalent of passing the Turing test. Trivia questions are quite guessable. I played a lot of College Bowl (and its local high-school equivalent) back in my younger days. And there were many running gags about the strategy. For example, if a question contained the words "Name this artist..." there was a strictly limited set of possible answers, defined roughly as "artists whose names appear in a typical high school art appreciation class". Similarly, "name this composer" is more likely to be cluing Beethoven or Bach or Mozart than Grieg or Saint-Saens, and almost certainly not anybody more obscure than that. And Grieg is not that obscure. There were a lot of common themes: It was a good idea to memorize the names of all the Greek, Roman, and Norse gods; the names of all the types of clouds; the capitals of countries and the names of political leaders. That sort of thing. In College Bowl (unlike Jeopardy) it is legal to press the buzzer and interrupt the questioner at any point. The questioner just stops reading until you've taken your guess. And so every College Bowl geek knows a story like this: Someone accidentally presses the buzzer before the person reading the questions has said more than one or two words. So, with nothing else to do but guess, the player shouts something out. And that guess is correct. I've never seen a zero-word guess work in person, but I've seen a few two and three-word guesses succeed. Given just a hint of the topic ("this scientist...") the odds are surprisingly good. The search space is just not that large. One reason why trivia is easy is that questions that require even the smallest amount of actual thought tend to be too ambiguous for good trivia. Trivia questions are generally read, answered, and judged by people who have no actual expertise in their subject matter, so it's important that the answers be very clear and unambiguous. I used to dread the physics questions, because I was a student physicist, and I understood the questions too well. So it was sometimes difficult to avoid giving answers that were technically correct, but that did not match the one on the card.
- andrewce 16y ago
  My college didn't have a college bowl team, but competing on high school teams and being responsible for more than a few correct two or three word answers, I can vouch for this. It's all about having enough breadth that the other bits of information presented can help whittle down answers by way of association and relationships. Good trivia players rely quite a bit on intuition. Ken Jennings mentioned (in his book) how Jeopardy! often has questions about rivers, so it was a fairly simple matter to just memorize river names and some basic associations with which to answer questions. It seems like Watson is mostly a really sophisticated algorithm on top of lots of brute force (2880 processors?!). Though I guess it could also be said that humans are just ugly bags of mostly water. That said: in something like medicine (differential diagnoses), such a system could also be extremely useful, given the frequent occurrence of a fairly limited number of "answers".
bioh42_2 16y ago
This sends chills down my spine. Allow me to rephrase that: Eventually the machine will better diagnose your symptoms. More accurately then a human doctor could.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  Let's see... Start with UMV technology. Add human image recognition systems, natural language processing and speech synthesis, expert system-based medical diagnosis, and, say, a built-in weapons system. I'll be in my bunker.
TheCondor 16y ago
Watson is completely amazing. The differences between Jeopardy and chess are staggering. I'd even say that in the chess challenge, they could kind of cheat, Deep Blue had every 5 piece board configuration in a book and so if it could play to 5 pieces left then it knew how to play from there, humans have their look up optimized differently. If this technology can be generally applied, it just seems like a radical tool, radical for medicine, law, and probably revolutionary for other professions where access to information hasn't been as important. That being said, a really really clever jeopardy playing machine just doesn't seem "intelligent" to me. Huge bounds forward, we're making progress, I'm not denying that but Watson isn't going to slurp in the works of Shakespeare and write down some original thoughts on it, comparing it to current events. Or contrast Wordsworth and Keats. Or suggest a new experiment to further identify envelope proteins on a virus. Or invent a new way to etch semiconductors even smaller than we currently are. Will we get there? Maybe, hopefully, maybe even in our life times, but this is comprehension and search, it's not inventing or creating yet. It seems like half the problem, maybe the easier half. Still awesome, maybe in a few years we'll have Watsons we can access from our phones or something.

acangiano 16y ago

This is going to be, for lack of better words, epic. On a personal level however, it's a reminder of how truly wondrous the future is. When Deep Blue beat Kasparov I was a kid in an Italian high school, trying to explain to disinterested fellow students why that was a big deal. Not even in my wildest dreams I would have imagined to be working for the company that made that and this event possible, in a different country than my own. Sorry for the slightly off topic comment, but I just wanted to remind everyone that the future can be a beautiful and surprising time if you stick around long enough to witness it.

Alex3917 16y ago
Reminds me of this Brad Paisley video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Yg9wjctRw&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Yg9wjctRw&feature=relat...
meterplech 16y ago
I love seeing this type of response. It's similar to the race to put a man on the moon. Some technology should be there to inspire.
- jonhohle 16y ago
  Not just inspire, but push the envelope. The fallout of traveling to space not only unified the country but provided new technologies which simply had no need to be created until something as epic as landing on an orbiting satellite was attempted. These actions pay dividends unrelated to the mission at hand.
  - dmd 16y ago
    By 'orbiting satellite' I'm guessing you meant the Moon, but I've personally always been most amazed not by the moon landing per se, but the subsequent return from the surface to dock with the waiting CSM.
    - ugh 16y ago

amichail 16y ago

There's a problem with statistical significance given that the match consists only of two games: http://www.quora.com/Does-IBM-Watson-Jeopardy-match-contribute-to-ignorance-about-statistics http://www.quora.com/Does-IBM-Watson-Jeopardy-match-contribu...

cryptoz 16y ago
I highly doubt that IBM will dismantle the machine when they're done (yes, I know that's what they did with Deep Blue, but this is different). I'd bet that far more than two games will be played with Watson, over the next few years. Also, as pointed out in that thread, this is no different than a regular Jeopardy game. One game consists of dozens and dozens of questions. If Watson answers them all correctly and the humans get zero points, that is indeed statistically significant. If the score is close, then repetition in games will be necessary. The problem with the assumption in that thread is that one Jeopardy game is vastly different than the next. In reality, you could string together a bunch of games and call it one game. Or take one game and split it up into 50 "games". The point is, inside one game, there are enough different questions to definitely count as statistically significant.
- amichail 16y ago
  That depends on what "better" means. If better means actually winning in Jeopardy, then two games is not enough. Final Jeopardy plays a significant role in who wins a game, so it's not just like combining multiple games into one. Even on the question level, a disclaimer should be given if Watson doesn't answer enough questions for statistical significance. Finally, the issue here is with contributing to the statistical ignorance of people watching the two game match. Sure, Watson has played many games already before the match but that's not what's being shown on TV.
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spot 16y ago

> Watson is comprised of 90 Power 750 servers, 16 TB of memory and 4 TB of disk storage 4TB disk? something is wrong here.

cryptoz 16y ago
Good spotting.
fourspace 16y ago
Perhaps they meant 360TB, 4TB per machine?
deleted 16y ago
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jimmyk 16y ago
It's possible that it's only 4 TB. If it's only processing text and it stores a character in two bytes, that means 2 trillion characters. At a generous 8 characters per word, that's 250 billion words. There are only 560,000 words in War and Peace, which is a very long book, and 44,000,000 in the Encyclopedia Britannica, meaning you could stuff in ~500,000 of the former or ~5000 of the latter. That seems sufficient for Jeopardy.
whatusername 16y ago
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/InsideSystemStorage/entry/watson_what_is_the_smartest_machine_on_earth7?lang=en https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/mydeveloperworks/blogs/In... "Several readers of my blog have asked for details on the storage aspects of Watson. Basically, it is a modified version of IBM Scale-Out NAS [SONAS] that IBM offers commercially, but running Linux on POWER instead of Linux-x86. System p expansion drawers of SAS 15K RPM 450GB drives, 12 drives each, are dual-connected to two storage nodes, for a total of 21.6TB of raw disk capacity. The storage nodes use IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) to provide clustered NFS access to the rest of the system. Each Power 750 has minimal internal storage mostly to hold the Linux operating system and programs. When Watson is booted up, the 15TB of total RAM are loaded up, and thereafter the DeepQA processing is all done from memory. According to IBM Research, "The actual size of the data (analyzed and indexed text, knowledge bases, etc.) used for candidate answer generation and evidence evaluation is under 1TB." For performance reasons, various subsets of the data are replicated in RAM on different functional groups of cluster nodes. The entire system is self-contained, Watson is NOT going to the internet searching for answers. "

shawnee_ 16y ago

The crazy thing is that Watson is < 5 years in the making. On PBS last night - http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622 http://video.pbs.org/video/1786674622 The "Making Stuff" series on Nova that's been airing the last week or so is very interesting: Making Suff Smarter / Stronger / Cleaner / Smaller. Watson was first mentioned during the episode of "Making Stuff Smarter" but I guess it merits its own segment.

kefs 16y ago

Eventually the machine will prevail What a great ending line. The NOVA special last night was great! http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth....

ajays 16y ago

A lot of geeks' girlfriends are going to be disappointed on 14th (aka Valentine's Day, in case you're wondering ;) ), as they huddle around a TV like schoolgirls watching a Bieber concert.

krupan 16y ago
I'm still trying to figure out how to negotiate this with my wife. I mean, you could record it, but then you have to try and not find out the result until you get a chance to watch it. That's tough.

ero5004 16y ago

Won't Watson have a significant advantage on the final Jeopardy question where time is not nearly as much of a factor? If it can just keep pace for most of the game and then bet it all on that last question, it should be no contest.

teraflop 16y ago
I wouldn't bet on it. In the "preview" round, Watson seemed to come up with its answers more or less instantaneously. (Or at least, before the host finished reading the question.) My guess is the limiting factor is the quality of the underlying dataset and cleverness of the algorithms, not CPU time.
- andrewce 16y ago
  Human contestants are also able to see the question typed out (much like it's displayed on the television), so people are able to do this as well. I'm usually able to read any given question in about a second. Granted, I used to practice speed-reading trivia questions for an hour or so per day (one of the leagues we competed in projected questions via powerpoint), but there's at least one reason most Jeopardy! contestants are able to buzz in almost immediately on most questions.

abrenzel 16y ago

I am intrigued by Watson. NLP is definitely something that has failed to live up to its billing so far. I will be very interested to see what kinds of questions Watson is good at and which he tends to miss, to see if there are any patterns there. Going forward, the other real questions will be: is Watson overfitted to the problem of solving Jeopardy questions, and how practical is the technology? The former is a real risk to the general applicability of Watson's technologies, the latter is a question of who can afford it. The article mentioned on commodity hardware, Watson takes about 2 hours per clue. They only achieve reasonable response times by using about 3000 cores. That limits the potential audience. Either way, I'm very interested to see what happens next week. I watched the demo videos on YouTube and it was quite cool.

johnohara 16y ago

engadget reported that Watson "destroyed" its human competition while others reported that humans were "taken down." In reality, Ken Jennings was beaten on the final answer. I'm interested in seeing whether Watson has an "aggressiveness" algorithm that allows it to respond before the answer is fully spoken. Humans have an advantage in this regard because it goes right to the heart of intelligence. If the game boils down to reaction time, Watson will probably win.

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senthil_rajasek 16y ago
"I'm interested in seeing whether Watson has an "aggressiveness" algorithm that allows it to respond before the answer is fully spoken. You cannot buzz in until the question is completely read out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!#cite_note-9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeopardy!#cite_note-9
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  True. But along the same lines... I wonder if it's able to say to itself "I think I'm in the right ballpark, so I'll buzz now" and then take the 3-4 seconds it takes the host to recognize the buzz and ask for an answer, to finish its processing to get to the answer it's most confident of. In other words, it doesn't need to actually have the answer to buzz. It just needs some confidence that the answer is close at hand.
  - johnohara 16y ago
    Given the number of servers (and cores) plus 16TB of memory, 1ms is an enormous amount of time. 500ms is 1/2 a second.
  - Splines 16y ago
    I'd wager that humans do the same thing (e.g., when they have an answer and it's on the tip of their tongue)

kenjackson 16y ago

How much of the Watson code is Java?

kls 16y ago
I don't know the percentages but Watson is built on UIAM http://uima.apache.org/ http://uima.apache.org/ which has bits in C++ and bits in Java. From there I am sure different teams used language bindings to use the language that best suited their particular needs to accomplish their tasks. Not that I know it to be true, but I would not be at all surprised to find R, Haskel and even some lisp in their somewhere.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Thanks for the link. That looks really impressive. For IBM this is presumably PR for their products/services. I do hope they disclose more of the architecture as I'd love to build out a system like this, even on a smaller scale (takes 6 hours to come back with an answer rather than three seconds).
  - kls 16y ago
    My understanding that this is the beginning of their DeepQA product line, my assumption is that the research and portions of the technology will be used for business insight and analytical to answer what if type questions. ,Just to be clear I don't work for IBM, and I do not know their intentions for the project, but I do take projects from IBM and have taken projects related to Watson, but I do not know their plans to monetize Watson, the former is just pure speculation on my part.

bengl3rt 16y ago

Affordable tablets, intelligent computers, commercial space travel... it's so great to live in the future. Now, won't somebody please design a viable successor to the Concorde?

bioh42_2 16y ago
First we need a viable airline industry any where in the world.

dstein 16y ago

Watson's voice isn't menacing enough.

RodgerTheGreat 16y ago
I'd settle for a decent Sean Connery impression.
WalterBright 16y ago
I'm sad they didn't use HAL's voice for it.

bgurupra 16y ago

http://www-943.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/ http://www-943.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/

bgurupra 16y ago
A classic use of watson that IBM is saying is in the field of medical science - Imagine if we can feed the entire set of medical books into watson (somebody estimated that would just take about a week for watson to process and make the connections) and then you have the watson physician's assistant which can listen into the symptoms and spit out the first five most probably causes - that would be so damn amazing!
- nradov 16y ago
  There are already experimental clinical decision support applications which, given a list of symptoms, can produce the differential diagnosis. But they generally aren't very useful since in most cases the physician can figure out the same diagnosis just as quickly. Real medicine isn't like House, MD. IBM is more likely to apply Watson technology toward analytics and data mining. There are huge amounts of clinical data locked up in unstructured text reports. If they can analyze that data in a useful way to draw correlations between symptoms, patient demographics, medications, treatments, and outcomes then that could add a lot of value for medical researchers.
glhaynes 16y ago
They can win at Jeopardy but they can't build a URL structure without annoying machine/network identifiers. :)
- bgurupra 16y ago
  that is actually my bad , this URL works too http://www.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/ http://www.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/ - basically this sends a request to the main front end proxy and because IBM hosts like a billion URLs the front end proxy redirects to the appropriate cluster

gcheong 16y ago

I've looked around a bit but couldn't find any information on how the game state and clues are input to Watson. Are they typed in on the fly? Pre-loaded and just revealed as clues are selected? Is it parsing speech and reading the board visually?

kenjackson 16y ago
I've heard (from Engadget) that it is given text on the fly. It does not do speech or visual recognition. But it gets the question the same time the contestants see them.

derwiki 16y ago

I think it would be cool to see IBM's creation versus a creation from Google versus (a person or another machine), although I doubt another company would want to make such a risky move. If Watson wins, huge PR win; if Watson loses, still a pretty big PR win.

mhb 16y ago

Maybe they should give it the answer "The specifications for a machine to beat you at Jeopardy."

waxpraxis 16y ago

I've been working on the periphery of this project for about a year now (my company created the on screen "avatar" that's shown at Watson's podium on stage) and it's been amazing to watch as Watson has progressed. Some of the early matches I got data from were downright funny. Lots of nonsense answers and weird correlations that kinda made sense but made it obvious Watson didn't really understand the problem space. In case you're interested the avatar gets realtime data from Watson and visualizes both Watson's internal state and the game state. The core bit is a collection of "threads" that swarm around the surface of a sphere. The speed, variability, color, and length of the threads are all tied to the data we get from Watson. The colors roughly correspond to confidence, and when the threads bunch up it has to do with what Watson is "doing" (i.e. if he gets an answer wrong the threads will go slow and gather to the bottom of the sphere, if one of the other contestants is answering the threads will gather on that side of of the sphere, etc). The designer and my team agreed early on that there would be exactly 42 threads. ;-) Oh, and when Watson speaks the threads push off the surface of the sphere to the intensity of the audio. It also makes a subtle glow in the center of the sphere brighten in an homage to Hal.

prpon 16y ago

NYTimes had 'Play against IBM Watson' interactive feature few months back. Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/16/magazine/watson-trivia-game.html?ref=magazine http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/06/16/magazine/watso...

wmf 16y ago
IIRC that does not actually let you play against Watson.

aforty 16y ago

That article is sort of bullshit. They already taped the Watson Jeopardy episodes last month, they just haven't aired them. Watson won.

seancron 16y ago
That was a practice round: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/ibm-watson-jeopardy/ http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/ibm-watson-jeopardy/
trafficlight 16y ago
Thanks for the spoiler. I didn't want to watch it anyway.

xutopia 16y ago

When the humans playing against Watson get slapped around it'll be a weird moment for humanity.

tgflynn 16y ago

One interesting observation, which I don't intend in any way to diminish the significance of this achievement, which I think will be seen as one of the most important milestones in the development of computer science, is that today there is so much information on the web that even Google with it's non-NLP algorithms can "almost" answer Jeopardy questions. There is an archive of past Jeopardy questions here : http://www.j-archive.com/ http://www.j-archive.com/ Try choosing a question and typing the category + the clue verbatim into Google. I've tried this a few times and in most cases the correct answer was in the top couple of sites (usually in the summary text on the Google search page). Of course there's still the problem of actually extracting the answer from the page and presenting it in the proper form.

RoboTeddy 16y ago

Here's a fascinating overview of how Watson (DeepQA) works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc The video goes into some detail, and looks at how Watson analyzes particular questions. It feels like AI is starting to become what people once thought it could be.

ZoFreX 16y ago

> When the software was run on a lone 2.6 GHz CPU, it took around 2 hours to process a typical Jeopardy clue -- not a very practical implementation. But when they parallelized the algorithms across the 2,880-core Watson, they were able to cut the processing time from a couple of hours to between 2 and 6 seconds. That is an impressive amount of parallelism! This is very back of the napkin (and I realise I'm comparing apples and oranges), but a rough estimate for the time taken if the problem was parallelised with 100% efficiency would be: (2 hours) / ((2880 * 3.55) / 2.6) = 1.83098592 seconds

mcrittenden 16y ago
What's 3.55?
- ZoFreX 16y ago
  Oops! The cores in Watson are 3.55 Ghz, sorry. I realise that ghz is not necessarily a measure of speed, this estimate could easily be out by a factor of 2 or 3.

goodgoblin 16y ago

I wonder whether Watson 'reads' the question or if the questions are fed to it directly as parameters, or if it has to 'listen' to the spoken words and start thinking about its response after that.

leelin 16y ago

Seems unfair for the humans. Wouldn't a more fair match be a series of individual 1-on-1 matches with Watson and Jennings / Rutter? The current configuration means the two humans will both share the questions that are naturally difficult for computers, but Watson will dominate all the questions naturally hard for humans. Alternatively, to make it fair, we would need a 2nd copy of Watson competing, and if the two Watson's buzz at the same time, randomly pick one to answer.

olalonde 16y ago

Did they give him HAL 9000's voice or am I crazy?

mkramlich 16y ago

This is the right way to test AI. "Alan Turing, meet Alex Trebeck."

EGreg 16y ago

When deep blue beat Kasparov, IBM quickly moved to shut down the program. Let's hope it doesn't happen in this case, if Watson wins.

efsavage 16y ago

We don't need to know math anymore because of calculators, now we don't need to know facts anymore because of watson. I guess from their shift to broadcasting opinions that the "news" outlets saw this coming...