Watson and Jeopardy

[marthter]

On 11-02-22 03:15 PM, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>> I believe Watson falls squarely under the umbrella term of Artificial
>> Intelligence.
> Hmm, OK.  I stand corrected.  I didn't think what it did would qualify
> as AI.  Watson is very very impressive either way.

Yeah, I only caught about 10 minutes of the middle episode (including 
the Final Jeopardy question), and I really found the pummelling of the 
humans pretty surreal.  Like this was the coming out party of our new, 
friendly-swirly-lines-around-the-big-cyclops-eye computer overlord.  I 
kept expecting a Saturday Night Live sketch to break out and Sean 
Connery to pop up in the middle spot.

Although the computer's performance was very impressive, I also 
sometimes doubted how advanced it really is.  A lot of earlier-round 
Jeopardy questions, you barely have to know, "Degas' painting blah blah 
was stolen in 19xx from this French capital".  You don't need to know 
anything about the artist, the painting, the date of the theft, ... do 
you "understand" the question, or do you basically keyword search your 
archive of articles/knowledge, for cities mentioned in the same 
sentence/paragraph/article as "French" and "capital".

Now certainly there were other more challenging questions on which it 
did quite well but it seemed to me the more indirect the question, the 
worse it did, such as the final Jeopardy city-with-two-airports question.

Cheers.

Martin
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