Further to my previous comment, I found the second final Jeopardy puzzle to be instructive. The category was "US Cities" and the clue was this:
Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle.
A reasonably smart human will come up with an algorithm on the fly for solving this, which is to start thinking of major US cities (likely to have 2 or more airports); remember the names of their airports, and think about whether any of the names sound like a battle or a war hero. The three obvious cities to try are Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. And "Midway" definitely sounds like the name of a battle.
But Watson was totally clueless. Even though it had the necessary information, it had to rely on pre-programmed algorithms to access that information. It was apparently unable to come up with a new algorithm on the fly.
Probably Watson relies heavily on statistical word associations. If the puzzle has "Charles Shulz" and "This Dog" in it, it will probably guess "Snoopy" without really parsing the puzzle. I'm just speculating here, but my impression is that AI has a long way to go.
...A reasonably smart human will come up with an algorithm on the fly for solving this, which is to start thinking of major US cities (likely to have 2 or more airports); remember the names of their airports, and think about whether any of the names sound like a battle or a war hero. The three obvious cities to try are Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. And "Midway" definitely sounds like the name of a battle.
But Watson was totally clueless. Even though it had the necessary information, it had to rely on pre-programmed algorithms to access that in
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