It seems to me that the media, and even LessWrong, are being rather overly impressed by, in effect, heuristic database lookups. A trivia quiz is surely a textbook example of playing to the strengths of the computer; and even so the humans had at least got a fighting chance. Can someone convince me that this is more impressive than it looks? Isn't it just a case of building a big-enough database with associative keyword nets, which was already well underway in the eighties and turned out to be a dead end?
Can someone convince me that this is more impressive than it looks? Isn't it just a case of building a big-enough database with associative keyword nets, which was already well underway in the eighties and turned out to be a dead end?
Recall why these seemed to be a dead end. Two major reasons were (as I understand it) that the databases had to be massive to be useful and that they didn't have easy ways of adding facts and relations without human intervention. Watson helps show directly that the first is no longer as big a deal, and will be less of a pro...
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.)