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Comment by zach | Hacker News Reader

Well, opinions differ then, because Ken Jennings said halfway through an NPR interview yesterday Watson has the "advantage of speed which no human reflexes can match."

Plus, come on, everyone who watched the match so far knows they're just trying to put some spin on this. The reason why humans don't wait for the light is because their nervous systems are too slow!

Watson doesn't have that problem. If timing and rhythm were so important, they would have Watson do that too. But we all know they don't need to.

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Speaking of reflexes, it reminds me of those games where your supposed to click/hit a button once it says go. I did a quick search and found this pretty simple flash reaction game: http://www.opendb.net/media/content/426.swf

Best I could do was .26 seconds =/

I bet someone with a Lego Mindstorm set could whip up a robot that would do this much faster.

Got .03 here

But that was after I figured out that you could just continually click the button and score much lower. Advantage humans.

You should have kept trying. I got .01 second by using your technique. http://i.imgur.com/PG92y.jpg . I recently had to go to a nerve specialist and we talked about the speed of the electrical pulses that go through your body. He told me that it is nowhere near the speed of electricity in wire - more on the order of meters per second, not miles per second.

The reaction timer was interesting -- I managed to get 0.16s in one attempt out of ~15, with most attempts ranging from .25-.35. It reminded me of exercises they had us do in driver's ed in high school to show how reaction time+braking distance was affected by alcohol.

Nice timer. I managed to hover around .25 by staring at the background color rather than the button itself. Unsettling to notice the time gap between my brain perceiving the color change and moving the finger/clicking.

I think the bigger issue is the fact that they 'feed' Watson the question via a text file.

That was probably the most (only?) disappointing thing they revealed. It would seem that voice-recognition is far enough along where that shouldn't be necessary. Maybe adding that would delay Watson just enough to seem far? Or perhaps I'm over simplifying the difficulties of adding voice recognition to Watson?

The interesting question is whether the computer can do natural language processing, not whether it can recognize spoken words.

Even the human contestants don't rely on the host reading the questions; they read the board. I guess you could argue that Watson should do OCR of the board, but that's not actually a hard problem, so it wouldn't really add much to the challenge.

They're focusing on language processing, not environmental sensors.

Right, perfect - that is actually more fundamental and exactly what I was getting at.

Is the game currently fair? It's hard to say but watching it seems like there is an advantage there for Watson.

I do like the way Jennings downplayed it though. I think he was being almost too kind but compared to how Kasporov handled himself, this is hugely better.

I haven't seen the video yet but I think the facts will show that the game is reasonably fair, given the different species participating.

Whether or not there is an advantage for Watson is, I suppose, rather the point of the exercise ;-)

Of course it's not fair. The question is whether Watson's advantages are offset by its disadvantages.

Humans on the show don't necessarily have to do voice-recognition either. The text is presented to them on the screen, and I'm sure they can read it faster than Trebek.

Exactly. It pops on the screen instantly, even if there's a video attached.

A contestant with a bad eyeglass prescription is a goner. Waiting to hear to the clue puts a player at a major disadvantage, especially on really short clues.

However, there is one very notable exception: Eddie Timanus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Timanus#Jeopardy.21

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