No voice recognition, and the mechanical buzzer pushing thing was kinda silly, but still, not bad. Certainly at least a decent step in natural language processing, right?
I know this is not at all anything like general AI (though I gather from the descriptions that there's at least some form of reinforcement learning going on when it gets stuff wrong. I may be wrong on that though), but still, I feel at least a bit impressed. (I wish there'd been auditory speech processing too, instead of receiving text, but...)
EDIT: either way, it's still just plain cool! :)
I know this is not at all anything like general AI
I'll confess that I still have a hard time shaking the intuition that this is how general AI will be arrived at, if and when it is: a bunch of things like this, more impressive with each generation, until it gradually occurs to us over the course a few decades or centuries that our computers can do everything we can do.
It was mentioned before on LessWrong, but I feel people might appreciate a reminder:
http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/what-is-watson/countdown-to-jeopardy.html
It's a bit of a cheesy PR thing - I'd be a lot more interested if they connected the program on the Internet and allowed anyone to try and ask them general questions, rather than mixing the program with voice recognition and (heh) buzzer-pushing. Trivia tests are also probably one of the easier challenges to deal with, since keyword filtering alone is very efficient in narrowing down the candidate space.
Still, I'm going to watch it if I can: if anybody knows of a streaming link that is accessible to non-US viewers, that would be appreciated.
(Silly aside: is anyone else annoyed by how "Jeopardy" pretends to invert the traditional question-answer format, while what it does is simply moving the "what is" from the former to the latter, even if the result makes no sense? I suppose to US people this is a rather old complaint, but I learnt about the show today and I'm rather bugged by this feature.)