Last night I watched the PBS Nova special on the making of the new Watson IBM computer that will be competing on Jeopardy next week. It was pretty cool. If you have any interest in the difficulties behind programming "artificial intelligence", I'd recommend seeking out a repeat of it.

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/27297.wss

The Jeopardy airings are next week starting on Monday when Watson goes up against previous Jeopardy champs. Consider my DVR set.

I watched the first part last night. I thought Watson was going to get blown out, but wow...it started blowing the other two out for a while. It is definitely an impressive achievement.

Yeah, although it's also interesting to see what types of questions Watson still struggles with. Basically the more abstract the question, the more likely Watson is to not guess correctly.

I'm totally biased--completely pro-human, so I'm rooting for Brad, who is pretty incredible at Jeopardy--I think that last night illustrates that he is a better player than Ken Jennings.

I think Watson's got some kind of edge in terms of buzzer timing or something. There are clearly answers that all 3 knew but Watson seemed to get the drop 90% of the time. There were a couple of times where Jennings was just buzzing in to get in and then fumbling around for answers (one he got, one he wiffed).

Maybe Ken and Brad are just out of practice when it comes to hitting that button after Trebek finishes the question, but I think Watson's got the edge with its ruthless, methodical button technique. (If Watson's text file gets input at the time Trebek starts reading the question, a machine of that power, 3 seconds or 2 minutes wouldn't make much difference in finding an answer for many of those questions. Then it just signals to answer as soon as its given the green light to do so.)

Ok, just watched tonight's episode. Wow, watson completely fucking destroyed those other two! One thing I am still baffled at, however, is how did Watson miss the final jeopardy question? U.S. cities, and the damn thing puts Toronto, not even in the U.S.!!!!! I thought all it had to do was go through its database, and say U.S. cities: Check. A city must have a certain population, so all U.S. geographical areas with a concentrated populace of a certain amount: Check. All U.S. cities with two airports: Check: All War heroes (which are all U.S. war veterans with certain medals): Check. Then it arrives at O'hare International:...well the answer must be Chicago, with a certain % past its threshold!!! Clearly, it's still got some programming bugs to work out!

Yeah...that was a pretty bad miss. Chicago's other airport (Midway) was the WWII battle referenced. Luckily it didn't pull a Cliff Claven and wager all its cash...only a couple hundred.

That is true. The machine can always be faster than the human, so most of the time, if Watson knows it, he's going to be able to answer.