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Comment by zach | Hacker News Reader

Of course. This isn't a match of equals, this is one of man versus machine. As fans know, most responses in a game of Jeopardy! are known by multiple players. That's especially so in a game of this caliber, so the knowledge aspect is really quite minimal compared to the ring-in factor. Both these guys slaughtered their opponents by being quick on the buzzer.

Watson is being granted first crack at the questions 90% of the time because of its electromechanical advantage. IBM may not have the mean brainpower that Google has, but they can clearly build a computer that can press a button quicker than Ken Jennings.

Knowing that a computer can consistently beat even the best to ever play the game to the buzzer, the IBM team could be pretty well assured of success once they got Watson performing well enough.

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the comparison to google seems, um, awkward?

"IBM holds more patents than any other U.S.-based technology company and has nine research laboratories worldwide. Its employees have garnered five Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, nine National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science."

admittedly, they've been around longer, but they're not exactly playing with crayons over there.

I'm just cracking wise. Watson is a very impressive project. Nonetheless, throw four to seven Google researchers and engineers at this project and you'd achieve comparable results. They've been cornering the market in this area.

But instant button pressing is not terribly impressive and yet is Watson's critical advantage. This match is framed as a battle of knowledge, not a struggle for humans to overcome the massive disadvantage of their meat-based nervous system, which it is.

This is largely glossed over. Watson would lose horribly if one of its engineers was pressing the button. If its electronic advantage on the button was taken away, it would be the kind of fascinating match I and a lot of people were expecting.

Google actually does do open-domain fact-based question answering for queries like:

"what is the capital of china"

which are probably closest to Jeopardy questions (technically speaking.)

The team that does this is a lot more than seven Google engineers. Yet, it is not the top selling features of Google, because -- it's not that easy.

There is a fine line between "seems easy" and "nearly impossible". A Google engineer does not equate to infinite skills.

Yes, watson can play Jeopardy. Jennings and Rutter can also do every other thing that a human being can do. The meat based system is still, on the measure, much more impressive.

Come on, outside of these academic exercises, IBM is now just a giant consulting firm.

umm yeah giant as in $100 billion in revenue and about $15 billion in net income. Not a bad business at all. I should hope to be so boring.

With over $10 billion a year in hardware sales.

$30M to build Watson to buy all this PR is brilliant. As was Deep Blue.

I just hope the next challenge isn't "defeat a standing army"

academic exercise? you call a turing prize or a nobel prize an academic exercise?

> the IBM team could be pretty well assured of success once they got Watson performing well enough.

That shouldn't minimize the accomplishment of actually performing well enough. If Watson were fast on the buzzer but couldn't answer accurately, he's be pretty far in the red about now.

Sure, but I believe the average Jeopardy contestant could probably win this match handily if they had Watson buzzing in for them.

Therefore they've made a machine that plays Jeopardy about as well as an average Jeopardy contestant.

That's still an impressive feat but not quite one I would have thought was out of reach five years ago.

Once they got Watson performing well enough... understatement of the year.

Is it heretical to say that for a project that researchers have been working on for six years, Watson performs as well as I would expect?

They have a ton of priors, a ton of specific optimizations, and a lot of resources.

It's pretty impressive but in a they-clearly-worked-a-lot-on-this way, not a what's-their-secret kind of way, you know?

It's pretty impressive but in a they-clearly-worked-a-lot-on-this way, not a what's-their-secret kind of way, you know?

If this isn't a "what's their secret kind of way" then what is, in your opinion? Or are you just more of the pragmatic, if its been done then obviously it could be done, duh.

It just seems like what I would expect, although I give them full credit for tackling this challenge in the first place. I'm not the only one:

http://www.madpickles.org/rokjoo/2011/02/14/ibm-watson-vs-go...

Well this guy is a Google employee, so his bias is obvious. But I'm not optimistic about Google if most of their employees can't differentiate between the difficulties in doing database queries and constructing an answer from a question. It's a FAR bigger jump than when we went to Google from Alta Vista -- especially since, coincidentally, IBM had the same virtually the same technology that Google had at the time, but they weren't focused on search -- they just thought it was interesting technology.

And let me add, if this is so incremental, I'd love to Google just turn this feature on. Let me ask it any question and just have it return the answer. at the top of the results page w/o me having to click a link. I don't think we'll be seeing that from Google any time soon.

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