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Jeopardy Champion Ken Jennings Q&A about IBM Watson
- acangiano 16y agoI love how he handles the, almost guaranteed, defeat with great grace and humor. For comparison, Kasparov was in tears. Not the same scenario of course, but I truly admire Kennings' attitude and acknowledgment of IBM's (and humanity's) accomplishments exemplified by Watson.
- aquateen 16y agoI've never heard of Kasparov actually crying after losing to Deep Blue. Reference?
- stevenbedrick 16y agoI don't know about tears, as such, but the NOVA documentary about Watson included a video clip from the end of the famous Kasparov-Deep Blue game. It showed him angrily storming away from the table after being beaten; the way the video was cut, in combination with the narration, gave the impression that he was something of a sore loser. Note, however, that it was a very short clip, and there was probably a lot of context that didn't come through.
- AndyKelley 16y agoMaybe he was angry because he felt like he wasn't performing at the top of his game, and that if he did perform at the top of his game, he might have won. I'd feel pretty angry if that were the case.
- scott_s 16y agoSure. But that's the point of commending someone for handling loss with grace and humor: it's contrary to their immediate emotion.
- AndyKelley 16y agoTrue, but it's my understanding that he asked for, and was denied, a rematch.
- ugh 16y agoHere is an interesting eyewitness writeup: http://www.chessbase.com/columns/column.asp?pid=146 http://www.chessbase.com/columns/column.asp?pid=146 It says nothing about crying but portrays a very gloomy mood. It seems that Kasparov made avoidable mistakes and that really got to him.
- nikcub 16y agoKasparov was pissed off about the human intervention to Deep Blue during the game. The scene where you see him jump out is where his frustration at knowing and realizing that humans had altered Deep Blue get the better of him. He demanded a re-match, and IBM declined.
- thecoffman 16y agoI was actually surprised at how funny he is - many times I find the personality type that supports being so good at that type of thing tends to be lacking in social skills (broad generalization of course) but he comes off as humble, personable and funny. His answer to the Now do you know how people felt when they were competing against you? question was especially interesting to me.
- icegreentea 16y agoAt one point during his winning streak, he purposefully answered incorrectly so he could say "what is a hoe". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKA0K7bf7Rc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKA0K7bf7Rc Well, I think it was purposefully anyways. (btw, he's a Mormon)
- andrewce 16y agoI watched that match back in high school (his streak corresponded with my own academic bowl team's season), and "What is a hoe?" was my response, too. I'd never heard that semantic sense of "rake" before, and felt somewhat scandalized that "hoe" would be a response on national television (while in high school, I felt great affinity toward the puritans).
- ojbyrne 16y agoI have known that from this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rake%27s_Progress http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rake%27s_Progress
- philwelch 16y agoDoes anyone else think "hoe" is actually a valid answer there, though? It's hard to tell from Ken's facial expression whether he "purposefully answered incorrectly" or just found himself amused at the situation.
- bena 16y agoHoe is not a valid answer because the other word you are looking for is "ho" which is a shortened form of "whore". Rake, on the other hand, is a homonym.
- BoppreH 16y agoThree Words Industrial Strength Magnets. Priceless. The guy's pretty intelligent (duh) and funny. Fortunately, he seems to be accepting the challenge quite well. Last thing we need after such an AI breakthrough is someone complaining about the fairness of the game.
- kunjaan 16y agoKen's answer was hillarious "They give Brad and me bottled water during every commercial break. I think you can see where this is going if the machine starts to build a big lead."
- toddh 16y ago"But I wouldn't call this unfair...precise timing just happens to be one thing computers are better at than we humans. It's not like I think Watson should try buzzing in more erratically just to give homo sapiens a chance." Wouldn't it be better to build a distribution of champion level response times and have Watson draw randomly from that distribution? That would seem more fair.
- steveklabnik 16y agoThe first rule of competitive game playing is that anything in the rules is... game. Illustrating that the computer has the advantage over humans is the entire point. Competitive game play is not about 'fair,' in fact, the best players specifically try to make the game as unfair as possible, within the rules of the game.
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- toddh 16y agoRules exist to make for fair play. That fact that people push the rules doesn't change that. That's why rule making is itself part of a larger iterative game. In this case there's a big gaping whole in the rules. You might as well let Watson pull the question out of the database before the clue is even spoken.
- pkamb 16y agoWe already know that computers have an advantage over human reaction time. We don't need Watson to tell us that, my laptop can press a button faster than I can. This is like requiring each player to run a mile before being able to answer the question... and then letting one guy drive a Corvette instead.
- gloob 16y agoAnd if the challenge IBM set for itself was "can we build a machine that travels faster than a person", that would be perfectly legitimate too.
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago"""I AM PLAYING A PRIME-TIME GAME SHOW AGAINST A SUPER-ADVANCED ROBOT! This is the coolest thing I will every do in my life by a factor of a million. The future is here.""" My kids think I'm a little weird because I think this battle is so cool (I think the more you understand about the implementation, the cooler this is), but this statement pretty much sums it up.
- enry_straker 16y agoI suspect you meant the word 'ever' not 'every' in your quote.
- alanh 16y agoGreat stuff. “An away game for humanity.” Worth the read!
- portman 16y agoKen Jennings is FUNNY. IBM: "There's a lot of you in Watson" Ken: "If it goes amuck and kills humanity and stuff so sorry lolz my bad!" Chat participant: "I read your first in practically a day, I loved it." Ken: "I'd like to thank my mom for taking part in the chat!"
- davidmathers 16y agoQ: "There was an article in the Post the other day about trivia now being trivial because of the ability to look up everything in an instant..." A: "...in a not-too-distant future where nobody knows their state capitals anymore, maybe trivia geeks will be revered for their even more fantastical-seeming abilities! We will be like gods to you, carried on litters to your feasts."
- checker659 16y agoOr this one: "Big congrats to @IBMWatson & the amazing team behind its Jeopardy success. Watson is the real deal. Now: rematch on Dancing with the Stars!"
- stcredzero 16y agoQ: I have already read plenty of doomsday reports for the blue-collar workforce that this technology could replace customer service representatives, in-patient counseling, bank tellers, cashiers, etc. Do you think Watson could replace Alex Trebek? I'm starting to wonder what Watson could do with the database of Stack Overflow.
- Splines 16y agoEnter CLIPPY It looks like you're writing an algorithm that is O(N^2)! Would you like me to optimize it? Let me take a screenshot so Jon Skeet can laugh at you. click PROGRAMMER frantically presses CLIPPY's close button
- stcredzero 16y agoI think Watson would kick Clippy's *ss.
- mindcrime 16y agoI think a broken Etch-a-Sketch would kick Clippy's arse.
- patio11 16y agoWatson is just Jon Skeet typing into a terminal while he's blocking on network input.
- entangld 16y agoSlightly off-topic: Is there anyway Watson could be used to fix Google's search results? /s
- icecommander 16y agoI'm more interested in a Q&A with Watson about Ken Jennings
- ilovecomputers 16y agoIt'll probably read Ken's wikipedia page out loud.
- ck2 16y agoDid you know it took 4 hours to film the episodes because Watson kept crashing? Seriously. http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/02/16/nova_610x363.png http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/02/16/nova_610x363.png
- nlawalker 16y agoI had no idea. Out of everything I've heard, including the buzzer response time advantage, this seems to be the one thing that isn't really fair. If Ken was a narcoleptic and fell asleep every couple of minutes, he wouldn't have been allowed to be a competitor. I still value what they're doing and of course it's fun to see the crazy thing play and win at Jeopardy, but I think the fact that it crashes continuously should at least be made more visible to the viewing audience. "Yes, folks, it can beat Ken at Jeopardy, but we still have to press the reset button every once in a while just like you do at home." Skynet may be getting smarter, but it still has fundamental problems.
- kingkilr 16y ago... no, I'm sort of shocked that's been so covered up. Several of the team members have been at my university giving presentations and talks on Watson (including one of the software engineering practices behind it) and I'm somewhere between shocked and appalled it wasn't mentioned.
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- presto8 16y agoAccording to cnet[1]: "Correction at 12:04 p.m.: After this story was published, we heard from PBS producer Michael Bicks that it was not, in fact, Watson that crashed during the show's taping. He would like to make clear the following: "I missblogged last night--It was not Watson, but the system that was the interface between Watson and the Jeopardy computer, completely separate from Watson, that crashed during the taping." [1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20032244-71.html#ixzz1EAdTWjzp http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20032244-71.html#ixzz1EAdT...
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- postfuturist 16y agoIt's unfair that Watson is allowed to basically use it's robotic reaction to time ring in instantly when the light turns on, but all audio and video daily doubles are avoided because IBM didn't bother to add audio and video inputs. If the show is catering to Watson's shortcomings, why couldn't they cater to human reaction time shortcomings? Edit: punctuation
- AndyKelley 16y agoI don't think your understanding of the situation is accurate: http://live.washingtonpost.com/jeopardy-ken-jennings.html#question-28 http://live.washingtonpost.com/jeopardy-ken-jennings.html#qu...
- postfuturist 16y agoWatson can't do this: it only buzzes once it has an answer in mind and a sufficiently high confidence interval. Well, they could have programmed it any way they wanted to. It would have been smarter just buzz in right away given that they knew it would be right most of the time. Regardless, Watson dominated because it was confident about an answer most of the time before the light turned on. If a human also wants to buzz in right when the light turns on, he or she will always be beaten by Watson. So, the game again boils down to who buzzes in first, regardless of confidence.
- AndyKelley 16y agoI must have misread your original post - reading it again it makes complete sense.
- jeremymims 16y agoA lot of this advantage is from correctly hitting the buzzer in time. When my college roommate was on the show, he said very often the trick was not buzzing in early and getting locked out. It was apparent that most contestants knew the correct answer for most questions. I imagine Watson would not have buzzer jitters.
- korussian 16y agoWait a second, did anyone else catch this?: * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * Quote: THE OUTCOME My understanding is that the shows are taped and you obviously know the outcome. You made the recent comment on MSNBC that in order to win you had to play and bet recklessly. Do humans have an advantage in terms of betting (game theory) Your comment seems to be a tell that a human won, any guidance appreciated. – February 15, 2011 10:59 AM Permalink A. KEN JENNINGS : I would say that Watson has the wagering edge--like you say, it's all game theory and math, and even a cheap PC is pretty good at doing math at high speeds. That said, a human player might be more willing to take risks that Watson is too smart to try. In the practice games I saw, betting big on Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy seemed like the only way to cancel out Watson's big buzzer advantage. * * * * HE DIDN'T ANSWER THE QUESTION! Is this confirmation that Ken Jennings wins?
- joejohnson 16y agoKen Jennings is cool. He's a pretty funny guy, too.
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- maeon3 16y agoTo provide a better challenge for both the humans and the machine, you should be able to buzz in as soon as the question is visible. Watson no doubt is doing most of the work in the time it takes the humans to load up the question into their mind.
- matthiaswh 16y agoInterestingly, Ken Jennings says about Watson what most people say about ordinary players: Watson sometimes takes some time to get acclimated to a category, so starting at the bottom gives me a chance to rack up some money before it gets confident. In theory! Supposedly that was Mr. Jennings' reasoning for jumping around during his streak, that the other players didn't have quite as long a time as him to consider the category. Not sure how tongue in cheek that remark was, though.
- machrider 16y agoI guess the difference is, Watson can easily retain the learning that is built up through a category, even if he hops around the board the entire round. For humans, the context switch is a lot more costly and a category change can catch you by surprise.