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Comment by acangiano | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

The Lunar Module is an amazing piece of engineering! It can land, be the base for excursions for more than three days, becomes and impromptu rocket launch pad and is eminently dockable. All that capability fits in a cube with a five meter edge and weighs less than 15 tons, it was developed and built in well less than ten years and it worked every single time.

Some like the raw power of the Saturn V, I think the multi-talented Lunar Module is much more amazing.

Reminds me of this Brad Paisley video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Yg9wjctRw&feature=relat...

Watson's defeat of top Jeopardy! players, while an impressive feat of natural language processing, is not as impressive as a defeat of a grand master, for one reason.

The reason is that when multiple contestants know the correct response in Jeopardy!, it all comes down to reflexive timing. It's no surprise that a computer could buzz in faster than a human being, and there's no evidence that Watson knows more correct responses than the human competitors.

I don't think you fully understand what is going on here. Watson will Process the slang in the sentence, figure out how the words are being used, understand the context of the question and then look through its internal databases to see if it can piece different pieces of knowledge that it has to come up with an answer.

THATS FUCKING HUGE!!!

What led you to believe that I don't understand what's going on? I definitely understand and appreciate IBM's accomplishment. I'm not minimizing the coolness of Watson being able to come up with so many correct responses, I'm minimizing the importance of its actual Jeopardy! gameplay. I'm not sure you understand the real game mechanics of Jeopardy! With highly proficient contestants, it comes down to being able to buzz in as soon as the light turns on indicating that the clue has been delivered by the host. All three contestants know the correct responses to most clues, and it really does come down to the buzzer reflexes, something Watson clearly has a huge advantage in.

Again, I fully understand and appreciate what an advance in natural language processing and sheer computation Watson represents. Even being able to match a below-average human Jeopardy! contestant would be impressive. However, the true game-winning technique in Jeopardy! (when all three contestants are highly skilled) is buzzer reflexes.

I think you are exactly right. Other commenters seem to be misunderstanding you.

It's clear that this is a huge achievement. However, it is different than a computer beating the human chess champion. All this will prove is that a computer is about the same as the best humans, not strictly better than them.

(And, that it is strictly better at timing its buzzer response, which is completely not impressive for a machine to excel at.)

I'd be curious in knowing the mean response time of Watson. That would shed some light on the topic.

But you still give Watson too little credit here. You have typically 3s from when the "answer" is shown to when you can click the buzzer. So in 3s Watson has to go through all of its databases and semantic links and formulate the question, from an answer that often doesn't even make sense to probably half of the US population. That's pretty impressive.

I understand and appreciate what Watson is doing. It's awesome and ground-breaking. However, with contestants of this skill level, most of the responses will be known by all contestants, and the real competition is how fast you can buzz in after the light turns on indicating the clue has been completed.

Think of it this way: if you had a human standing in Watson's spot, with a monitor displaying Watson's suggested response, I don't think that human would perform as well against the other human contestants. Sure, Watson would often come up with the correct response while the clue was being spoken by the host, but the human would still have to buzz in when the light turns on. If you buzz in too early, you get locked out for something like a quarter of a second. Watson would still be extremely awesome technology, but I don't think a human with access to Watson's output would compete at anywhere near the level that Watson did in the video.

with contestants of this skill level

Do you see what you're saying.. "contestants of this skill level"? It's Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter, and WATSON. Discussion over. The fact that there is a computer that can answer questions in 3s that put it at the level of the two greatest trivia players in history is THE story.

Some jeopardy answers:

Anagramed Animals -- A furry little pet: the rams

Some say the Bush administration's domestic spying conflicts with FISA, the Foreign Intelligence this Act

"R"2"D"2 -- More rubicund

Half the people in the US probably couldn't answer any of these at all, much less necessarily even know what the answer was referring to, period.

The fact that the computer may have an advantage at pressing the buzzer against the two best buzzer pushers of all time is a pretty small deal. IMHO. :-)

I am expressing marvel that a computer can respond to many Jeopardy! clues in 3 seconds. That is marvelous, amazing, and awesome. Don't infer that I am undervaluing that achievement.

The additional fact that this computer can beat human players is not impressive to me, because I know how Jeopardy! works. To sum everything up: it's a great feat of artificial intelligence and computer performance for Watson to generate correct responses so quickly; it's not a great feat for Watson to be able to buzz in faster than human competitors. I think IBM could have chosen a better sort of competition to truly show off Watson's abilities than a competition with reflexes as the final layer of competition.

I just submitted this story (http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-watson-sees-...), but here is a quote from it that was interesting:

"The best human contestants don’t wait for, but instead anticipate when Trebek will finish reading a clue. They time their “buzz” for the instant when the last word leaves Trebek’s mouth and the “Buzzer Enable” light turns on. Watson cannot anticipate. He can only react to the enable signal. While Watson reacts at an impressive speed, humans can and do buzz in faster than his best possible reaction time."

I suspect if anyone is good at anticipating the buzzer it is Jennings and Rutter -- the two best Jeopardy players in history. At least until next week...

I'm skeptical of that. Is the Watson's computer to solenoid path really slower than the brain to muscle path of a human? Sure, an anticipatory human could buzz in after the light is electronically triggered but before the luminescent fixture (LED, or whatever) fired up, but humans will also undoubtedly jump the gun and buzz in too early, causing them to be locked out. To say that a human, even a seasoned Jeopardy! player, could beat a computer and solenoid any significant portion of the time, is something I have a lot of trouble accepting.

I don't think its all that hard to believe. Remember that Watson also has to depress a physical button (the same buzzer everyone else uses).

The eye to finger path for humans is about 200ms. It probably takes about 100ms for Watson to physically press the button. So Watson is about 100ms faster. But that also gives humans about a 100ms window in which to beat Watson. This means that you need to start your press 100-200ms before Trebek finishes his last word.

That's pretty good sized window for most people given you are reading the question along with Trebek. If the person who turns the light on is very consistent, I think a human who is good at this could consistently beat Watson.

How many people in the US could answer these if given access to wikipedia, the OED, etc? Nearly anyone.

So you're saying that a human aided by a computer, internet connection, and access to additional data can answer intentionally formed trivia questions as well as an unmanned computer (although I suspect a fair bit slower)?

This is the biggest innovation in computers in my lifetime and kids are like, "but its no Twitter".

Watson doesn't have internet access. It has just learned from thousands of sources and thousands of Jeopardy! questions. Just like human Jeopardy! contestants.

I'm saying that Watson's advantage in trivia-answering comes mainly from aptitudes which are already well-known to favor the computer.

Watson's human-level performance at Jeopardy comes from the combination of highly superhuman data retrieval with highly subhuman language processing.

Watson is more a spectacle than an innovation.

And here we see the AI paradox..

As soon as AI succeeds at something, it is simple.

"Reverse primary thrust, Marvin." That's what they say to me. "Open airlock number 3, Marvin." "Marvin, can you pick up that piece of paper?" Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper.

Marvin the Paranoid Android, in HHGG

Are you an AI? Your response is completely generic, taking into account none of the specifics of my argument.

The main difference between chess and Jeopardy is that Watson has to interpret ambigous (and awkwardly presented) "answers" and interpret what will be a suitable "question" to that. Both these two are really difficult. Watson needs a lot of natural language understanding across all lingusitic domains to even be able to search its databases and rule engines and what have you.

Chess, in contrast, is a totally deterministic game and the game state can easily be fed into a computer. That computers are able to beat humans at that comes as no surprise.

If Deep Blue had tied Kasparov, it would still have been a tremendous achievement. I'd say the victory was only minimally more impressive.

Human reflexes, when ready for a signal can respond easily with 0.2 of a second and often much faster, this is the sum total of the advantage that Watson has. This is irrelevant, what matters is that Watson has probably reached the stage where it can compete with the best of humans in a game involving abstract reasoning and natural language processing and do it fast enough where people can start arguing about fractions of a second!

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