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Comment by dstein | Hacker News Reader

The question is fed to Watson as text

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.

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It can always be "awesomer". However, calling it half-assed I think is a bit harsh. The truly novel aspects of Watson are that in its abilies in to answer questions in a truly domian-free way. It is not trained to be an expert in a specific domain, but instead to calculate what it believes to be the best answer from any domain. This is truly novel and amazing. That it can do this with Jeopardy questions, regardless of how it is given those questions, is truly remarkable. Jeopardy questions are often times laden with puns or other literay devices. Watson can understand and answer better than the vast majority of humans on this planet. That it can't currently "see" or "hear" is, IMO, less interesting given the advances it makes in deep QA.

I didn't mean to sound harsh - I understand the significance. I just meant the technology involved in Watson being able to answer such questions is undoubtedly orders of magnitude more complex than the OCR and speech recognition required to process the question in the first place.

They're playing a "human" game after all, and they're not playing like a human is fed into the computer electronically.

You realize that if it were only to recognize speech, other players would have a significant time advantage because they can read the text in probably 1/10th of the time it takes the host to speak the question out loud. "Feeding" Watson the text is just another way of saying Watson "reads" the text displayed on the screen, just like every human is allowed to.

Yeah, OCR (optical character recognition) would probably be used for reading the questions. The speech recognition would be for listening to other people's answers so as not to duplicate wrong answers.

Well is the text "fed" in a word at a time, or the whole question as a block that takes nanoseconds to parse. That's an unfair advantage if so because because the computer is getting the data in a different format than the other contestants, who are handicapped since they have to preprocess the data in a way the computer doesn't because it has been preprocessed in advance for it.

How are the two situations any different? Just because a program has an entire block of text in memory doesn't mean that it can instantaneously build all the data structures needed to process and make sense of it. We both "read," Watson's "reading" just takes place in its code.

It's very different. The humans have to decode the visual and aural representations before parsing for meaning can commence. The computer should have to do this too, but that step has been done in advance for the computer. This gives the computer a time advantage not because it was faster at computing, but because necessary computing was removed in advance from its task.

But it would be trivial to OCR the text in a few microseconds, so I don't see how it makes any difference at all to give the text to the computer...

"Watson can understand and answer better than the vast majority of humans on this planet."

Only for extremely limited definitions of "understand".

Get back in your chinese room.

I kind of agree, but OCR with a stable camera on the clue board would be extremely fast, reliable, and trivial, so it wouldn't make it much more impressive. Voice recognition (without OCR or a text interface to fall back on) would certainly be impressive, but I doubt it would be very reliable or impressive. I may be underestimating the state of the art on voice recognition; it may be very accurate considering Trebek's great diction and the clean studio audio that would be captured.

I'm pretty sure his voice is just a tribute to HAL. I like it.

That's ironic, because "HAL" is a shift of IBM: [I B M] - [1 1 1] = [H A L].

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.

They took a lesson from Dr. Soong, skipped Lore and went straight to Data.

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