http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth....
One question I have about Watson that I don't recall being mentioned in any videos or articles so far - what sort of interface does Watson receive the questions over? Is Watson performing speech recognition or getting the text of the question via some sort of interface?
How does Watson know when it can chime in then?
That said, I wish the engineers would have implemented OCR technology into Watson so it could see the TV screen, decipher the text question, and understand it -- instead of directly being fed the question. It would have given Watson a nice little title of being'complete'.
Edit: Failed to read the comments lower on the page. Looks like Watson plays by the same rules as everyone else, using a physical buzzer which can't be activated until the question is read and the 'answer now' signal light is activated. I know that another restriction on when to answer that Watson has is that he won't buzz in until he's confident in an answer, while human players will sometimes buzz in figuring they will be able to come up with the answer in the couple seconds between buzzing and answering.
For IBM Watson playing Jeopardy against humans the buzzer reaction time is exceedingly important. The buzzer is an integral, possibly even central, part of the game.
Someone would have to transcribe what the other contestants are saying only if Watson would also get their incorrect answers which doesn’t seem to be the case.
Aw this seems rather half-assed to me. I hope at a later time they do another one of these with a new and improved Watson. I really want to see a humanoid robot standing on the podium (connected by wifi to the supercomputer) and using OCR and speech recognition. I also think Watson's voice should be more authoritative. It's like they went to extraordinary effort to make Watson sound unimposing.
They're playing a "human" game after all, and they're not playing like a human is fed into the computer electronically.
Only for extremely limited definitions of "understand".
Apparently Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick didn't notice this. "As it happened, IBM had given us a good deal of help, so we were quite embarrassed by this, and would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence." - A.C.C.
Amazing that PBS is locking down their videos. They're public television fer cryin' out loud.
It genuinely is supported by individual donations. Showing their programs to a wider audience could only result in more people donating to them.
I don’t know whether more people would donate if they made their content available worldwide but if such a move wouldn’t cost them anything or nearly nothing there certainly wouldn’t be any harm in doing so.
Have you watched KQED (PBS affiliate in the Bay Area) recently? It's filled with commercials! HHMI, Subaru, etc. Not just static images; video commercials, just like you see in other channels. I wonder what sets PBS apart now (except for the pledge drive) ?
Furthermore, the insinuation at the end is uncalled for. Calling for cutting funding of public radio/tv is already a political talking point (at least in regards to cutting BBC), so can you imagine the heat they'd catch for trying to develop codecs as well?
Edit: removed PBS from list of cutting funding. Forgot they're donation supported.
In a few tiny ways their low budget is a good thing, ie. PBS Newshour doesn't have the insane stupid graphics/animations/toys that mainstream news does.
But in almost every other way their low budget in ruining the experience now.
Either they ended up not implementing this, or Watson didn't hear him correctly :)
After typing out this comment it occurs to me that if you carefully consider each answer there is only only logical question for all the answers in this category. Although I don't have any specific examples, there are times when a question is ruled incorrect because of the category name (e.g The category called for a specific number of letters in the response).
edit: furthermore, sometimes it's impossible to narrow down the answer if you don't understand the category. For example, if the category is '"C" you later' or something, there might be like 8 possible synonyms that fit, but only one starts with a "C".
The screenshots looked like Eclipse with Java. The brief snippets I could make out certainly looked like they had to do with evaluating rules and scoring judgment, but that could have easily been stock footage.