1. It is most likely that Watson is far less powerful than advertised. Given enough trials, a pigeon could probably detect some forms of cancer that a human expert can't. [1]

2. I too would prefer that more open-source work (and published research) would come out of Watson project than it has been the case so far. However, there's a devil's advocate point to be made that closedness encourages diversity of approaches and implementations. When a high-profile project becomes open-source (as recently happened with TensorFlow), it exerts a lot of pull on time/attention of other developers and researchers that could have been focused on trying out entirely different approaches.

[1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/using-pigeons-to-d...

> It is most likely that Watson is far less powerful than advertised.

And what is so unlikely about the Watson approach anyway? Have you ever played Akinator? It's not that different.

Of course, just like monkeys picking stocks with darts can outperform the best traders on Wall street.

That's not even remotely true.

The Quantum Fund by Soros and others, returned upwards of 30% per year for over three decades.

Steve Cohen averaged near 30% annual returns for two decades.

Buffett's investing track record is similarly off the charts.

And lastly, a monkey couldn't do what John Paulson (or Burry and Eisman) did with the 'greatest trade ever,' producing a radical outcome from an extremely intricate concentrated investment (some of which required them goading the opportunity into existence to begin with).

If you had said monkeys with darts can sometimes outperform the bottom half of traders on Wall Street, you might have been close.

30% returns per year for over three decades? Impressive. I wonder how much of that was attributed to insider information.

How is this down voted? Steve Cohen is practically synonymous with insider trading in the modern era.

Using Steven Cohen as an example only hurts your argument. His success has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with insider trading.

As a research scientist at a face recognition company, Watson doesn't strike me as particularly powerful or rare. As mentioned in one of the other comments, IBM PR is pretty impressive though.

A good example of Dunning Kruger syndrome.

-- someone in NLP

I'd say that is exactly why this matters... more automation would let the doctors do more research into new treatments, and let computers run the day to day algorithms (Symptom A gets Test B, followed by results C, which is labelled as diagnosis D, and treatment E.)

Having had years of struggle to get a diagnosis on my own problems, the most frustrating part of it all is that exact process, where you are just plugged into the machinery of our health care system, and run through to get a canned answer that needed no human judgment at all, just canned knowledge and a prescribed treatment plan.

So just my own opinion, but yes, please let us automate that portion of medicine, so the doctors can do more research and improve things.

We have DeepDive. It's a start at a FOSS alternative.

http://deepdive.stanford.edu/

It works in a rather different way under the hood, right?

I'd assume it being a clean-slate development. Apache project has one that's shared with Watson. I just liked this one.

>Something this powerful

You'd be surprised. Watson is nothing to write home about, it's an umbrella term for various disparate technologies (the chess version is not the same as the Jeopardy version, etc) and most of them are not that impressive in the first place.

Watson is hyped by the media.