Posted 06.16.2010 at 3:44 pm
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What is a hatbox? Here at PopSci, we're smarter than supercomputers.
New York Times
Here's how to end any productivity you may have had today: courtesy of the New York Times, you can now go head-to-head in Jeopardy against Watson, IBM's trivia-playing supercomputer.
As PopSci reported last year, Watson was designed to decipher Alex Trebek's riddles, tolerate his pronunciation of French words, evaluate its confidence about possible solutions and ring in with an answer -- all within seconds. Now you can beat it at its own game.
IBM scientists started practicing with Watson last winter, and the computer won several matches against frustrated humans, as the New York Times Magazine reports.
Watson evolved out of IBM's DeepQA research on natural-language processing, a means of digitally parsing the information in human communication. The computer is intended to be the world's most advanced "question answering" machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human language and respond with a precise, factual answer.
Operating at petaflops of parallel processing power, Watson thumbs through its databases, which include scanned textbooks, to come up with the best answers.
Watson is apparently scheduled to make a Jeopardy appearance this fall, but you can make yourself feel smarter (or dumber) today, thanks to the Times' little preview.
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Extra "h" in the url for the New York Times page, but link works apart from that. I can't get any of the questions without looking them up though. Guess computers really are smarter than me :-(
Interesting... Beat Watson 35 to 19.
But then again I had unlimited time and cheated on 3 of the questions.
Looking at the questions Watson got wrong it seems it trips up more on the creatively worded questions.
I liked in particular how both Watson and I were confused on what exactly an ascot was.
I laughed out loud when it answered "Lincoln Green Revolution."
Still, if timing were an issue? I'm betting I would have been beaten soundly as Watson scored a 41 when I tested it by passing on all the questions.
Trick to deciphering between AI and natural intelligence?
Reading comprehension.
Which is kinda sad because that's on the decline in society.
On a side note you guys need to improve your CAPTCHA system.
I've input the appropriate word every time but the system still thinks it's spam the first time.
(Except this time... okay maybe I just misspelled things)
Not to mention do you really need the CAPTCHA after previewing a comment and before posting?
If a spambot gets through the first time it will get through the second. And if it's a human posting, particularly the type who likes to preview and check their words before posting, you just annoy them.
Don't annoy humans please. Humans are not fond of annoyance.