Watson and Jeopardy

[Yanni Chiu]

On 02/03/11 11:31 PM, marthter wrote:
>  ... 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".

IIUC, the technology/intelligence is to parse the answer/question, use 
that parse to narrow the search of a huge knowledge-base, assign 
probabilities to possible answer/question. Then decide whether the 
probability is high enough to ring the buzzer. A "learning" phase is 
used to "teach" the system how to choose the best answer/question.

It sounds a lot like what humans would do to be good at Jeopardy. So 
they've created a super Jeopardy machine. But IMHO, humans are still 
capable of much more. It's kind of like computers are really good at 
saving data and making calculations, compared to humans. Now they're 
also good at recalling trivia.

Funny that their envisioned uses of the technology is for medical 
diagnosis. That kind of says that doctoring is an "easy" task that 
computers could encroach upon.

Maybe there needs to be a new challenge (or AI gauge) - namely, build a 
machine that can build a really good Jeopardy player. Then, us software 
guys/gals would be looking over our shoulders.
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