Comments on: Humanity Lost on Jeopardy!

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 11:06:24 +0000

I agree the buzzer was unfair. However Watson still had to be good. Answering incorrectly on jeopardy means losing points. So Watson had to be accurate and even more difficult, know when it is accurate.

By: zbicyclist

zbicyclist — Sun, 20 Feb 2011 01:53:29 +0000

The real losers were the people who work in call centers and similar jobs.

It’s easy to see that Watson could understand my issues substantially better than the average “customer service” rep, and be much more consistent in applying corporate policy.

By: Basil

Basil — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 17:55:24 +0000

I’m so glad you posted on this! I watch Jeopardy somewhat regularly and was slightly upset at the computer victory. I was most curious to how they were making the buzz times fair, but now I know they didn’t. The other aspect that was totally unfair was the input of the question. I believe the only fair way to make the computer read the question is visually and verbally like the audience and other participants. The computer could easily be programmed to do this and cross validate its visual predictions with its verbal predictions of the question.

By: Cody L. Custis

Cody L. Custis — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 19:02:44 +0000

I must concur with Jennings conclusion that Watson had an unfair advantage with buzzers. However, that can be easily fixed for a rematch.

The real challenge isn’t when an upgraded version of Watson (one that has to process speech) wins a Jeopardy round with a fair buzzer system. It’s not even when the upgraded Watson is able to parse away Alex Trebek’s banter to get to questions, and learn from humans when the answers are wrong. The challenge is when the upgraded version of Watson goes on David Letterman the next day to talk about the victory.

By: Lev Reyzin

Lev Reyzin — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:19:12 +0000

I’ve become convinced you’re right about the buzzer. As Ken Jennings notes (http://is.gd/kpuyKc) and Scott Aaronson writes (http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=550), this game was a repeated demonstration that computers are faster than humans, but not that they are better at trivia. While I don’t know if the advantage was “unfair,” it certainly made the contest less illustrative.

By: dreeves

dreeves — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:46:55 +0000

@Bryce, good point, but we expect Watson to have the edge in that aspect of the game, right? And I think even our ML friends will have to agree it’s an uninteresting aspect of the game. Anyway, it’s minor compared to the buzzer aspect (hence only a footnote) but it detracts slightly from the coolness of Watson’s victory.

Btw, I lost yet another $20 for a typo in this post. Unclosed parenthesis. What I get for not composing in Emacs.

By: Bryce

Bryce — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 13:43:57 +0000

Re: footnote #2, Brad and Ken know that probability too. It was a huge part of their advantage over lesser Jeopardy competitors when they played against humans. The hunting-for-daily-doubles board-clearance pattern that we saw during the IBM chalenge wasn’t really indicative of a computer being in the game so much as it was indicative of a very high-level game of Jeopardy.