Comment by etangent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by etangent | Hacker News Reader

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1. It is most likely that Watson is far less powerful than advertised. Given enough trials, a pigeon could probably detect some forms of cancer that a human expert can't. [1]

2. I too would prefer that more open-source work (and published research) would come out of Watson project than it has been the case so far. However, there's a devil's advocate point to be made that closedness encourages diversity of approaches and implementations. When a high-profile project becomes open-source (as recently happened with TensorFlow), it exerts a lot of pull on time/attention of other developers and researchers that could have been focused on trying out entirely different approaches.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/using-pigeons-to-d...

> It is most likely that Watson is far less powerful than advertised.

And what is so unlikely about the Watson approach anyway? Have you ever played Akinator? It's not that different.

Of course, just like monkeys picking stocks with darts can outperform the best traders on Wall street.

That's not even remotely true.

The Quantum Fund by Soros and others, returned upwards of 30% per year for over three decades.

Steve Cohen averaged near 30% annual returns for two decades.

Buffett's investing track record is similarly off the charts.

And lastly, a monkey couldn't do what John Paulson (or Burry and Eisman) did with the 'greatest trade ever,' producing a radical outcome from an extremely intricate concentrated investment (some of which required them goading the opportunity into existence to begin with).

If you had said monkeys with darts can sometimes outperform the bottom half of traders on Wall Street, you might have been close.

30% returns per year for over three decades? Impressive. I wonder how much of that was attributed to insider information.

How is this down voted? Steve Cohen is practically synonymous with insider trading in the modern era.

Using Steven Cohen as an example only hurts your argument. His success has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with insider trading.

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