IBM Watson-Jeopardy Challenge party
The viewing party took place at the Castle Theater here today – the largest such event in the country outside of New York City. The event was sold out with a waiting list and standing-room filled.
IBM Watson-Jeopardy challenge 16 February 2011, at the Castle Theater in Bloomington, IL
More pictures beginning here.
It was pretty amazing to see a computer figure out word puns and double-entendres. This had nothing to do with the number of cores involved or even the gigantitude of the database, by the way. It was a big supercomputer to be sure, but the clever part was the machine making some kind of functional sense from the tangle of concepts we call language.
On the other hand, if you took Watson and put it in the head of a Terminator, it would be very easy to defeat. For now. Certainly there was no danger of this thing becoming sentient and taking over the world.
The IBM engineer talked a little bit about potential applications in medical and education fields. Would you tell a computer things you wouldn’t tell a nurse? Might the computer be able to figure out things that a human doctor or nurse would be too habituated to spot? How about a virtual teacher who could give your child 100% attention?
NOTES:
- Official IBM site ibmwatson.com where you can watch the video and get the totally unbiased IBM take on how natural-language processing will transform industries.
- The Pantagraph: Hundreds watch special Jeopardy episode at theater
- I for one welcome our new machine overlords - thoughts on Watson and the nuance of language. (For all the howling over Watson’s “Toronto” gaffe and the bit about the Olympic runner’s absent leg, people make the same kind of conceptual mistakes all the time. Even people who make fun of Watson’s mistakes.)
- Not-So-Elementary Watson: What IBM’s Jeopardy! Computer Means for Turing Tests and the Future of Artificial Intelligence (PLOS)
- My Puny Human Brain: Jeopardy genius Ken Jennings on what it’s like to play against a supercomputer
- Data Mining – A judgment of Watson: mathematics wins!
- Not so elementary Watson: what IBM’s Jeopardy computer means for Turing tests and the future of Artificial Intelligence
- IBM Watson vs. Humans, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Wolfram (hint: they’re not impressed)
- IBM Research: Watson’s wagering strategies. (This was one of the oddest things about Watson’s performance, and it’s what made me think it would lose in a strategy contest against a human.)
- The Terminator: “I know now why you cry” (YouTube)
I’m glad Ewan has degrees in linguistics with minor in CS. Proud dad.
That looks like so much fun! Witnessing history in a historic setting – nothing better. Gorgeous photos, as always, too!
But yes, the border fiasco is perplexing.
You mean that Toronto is now a US city? Not really perplexing. In some ways it’s almost human; I make mistakes like that all the time and so do you; we call them “brain farts” and move on.