Re:Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late
by jshort on Tuesday October 04, 2011 @09:58PM
(#3073802)
Yes, Watson had a major advantage at buzzing in but he was also capable of understanding or computing the questions. This is significant as the questions on Jeopardy aren't simply x + y = z but contain the complexities of the English language.
Re:Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late
by ebiester on Wednesday October 05, 2011 @11:53AM
(#3076176)
"True" AI is a misnomer, though, and is still far away, as we still don't know what we don't know. But conversational AI? The processing power will be there and we know where the algorithms need to improve, and we have ideas on how to do it.
My point was more that we know what's left. That hasn't been the case before the last five years or so.
Most human contestants (at the champion level) know the answers to most the questions. The gamesmanship, according to the all-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings in a recent Fresh Air interview (Jennings returned to the show to take on Watson) is in the button press timing.
Watson has superb accuracy.
The computer actually knew the answers to fewer questions than the humans, but when Watson did know the answers, it always got the buzzer.
Helps to pull back the curtain a bit at times.
True AI and speech are hard. They're getting good. Scary good at times. There's an Android voice-to-voice translation app I've used to communicate with a Mandarin speaker (I manage just a few phrases). After doing that, I spent about fifteen minutes just staring at my phone and realizing that another huge piece of my future was now my present.
And I know the pieces behind it: voice recognition (cloud-assisted), translation, speech synthesis. But it's still mind-bogglingly cool. To me at least.
For my kids, probably not so much.