IBM Watson in danger! first day: could do better

By Richi Jennings. February 15, 2011.

The first day of the IBM supercomputer game of jeopardy! It's over. Watson has reasonably well, but his game was far from perfect. Stay tuned for another two days. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder, "what is Watson?"

Your humble blogwatcher curated by these bits bloggy for your entertainment. Not to mention the shortest path between two Wikipedia articles ...
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Dean Takahashi reports:

Competitor Ruttner linked with human Brad Watson, a supercomputer built by IBM. Another rival, Ken Jennings, is not far behind. ... The match has demonstrated that artificial intelligence technology of IBM is a force to be reckoned with, and in the future is only going to get better. ... Some scientists from IBM Research 25 worldwide struggled for four years on Watson, who is spiritual successor of IBM's Deep Blue, the supercomputer that chess master Gary Kasparov in 1997 defeated.
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At the beginning of the second half, Watson had $ 5200, Rutter had $ 1000 and Jennings was only $ 200. Then, the man made their comeback, beating the buzzer Watson a couple of times. And Watson wrong answers in the second half.

Timothy Prickett-Morgan adds:

Jennings, who once had a winning streak of 74-game Jeopardy, is known to be one with the beep, but Watson cleaned his clock before the first commercial break. ... As a few more incorrect assumptions Watson, Brad Rutter – which has won more dough than anyone else playing Jeopardy – came alive and started transferring money.

Elizabeth a. Harrisspeaks of errors Watson:

"Elegance, elegant, or students who all graduates in the same year," read the question. "What is chic?" Watson replied.
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"What is the class?" Mr. Rutter said.
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At the end of the turn on Monday, Mr. Rutter and Watson were tied to 5000 dollars each. Mr. Jennings ... slunk off in time slot Wheel of Fortune with only $ 2,000. The winner of this contest three days will be awarded $ 1 million.

Gordon Haffcomments on the avian influenza situation:

Speech understanding proved to be really difficult. ... In fact, when IBM Watson takes on past samples of "danger" in a televised contest beginning tonight, the questions presented to it as text rather than speech. But answering questions often twisted used on "danger" is hard enough without spoken word processing.
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Watson is in no real sense of thinking and the use of the term "agreement" in the context of Watson should be taken as anthropomorphism, rather than a literal description. ... Watson is part of the project DeepQA of IBM. The QA stands for question answering. ... In association with Carnegie Mellon University, IBM created the Open progress of question answering (OAQA). ... Among other things, this initiative aims to enable the software to adapt Watson of new domains of data and the types of problem.

Michael cooneycalls "The ultimate in man v. machine moments":

If the preliminary test sessions are any indication, you give the supercomputers of natural language known as Watson of IBM ... Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter a serious run for their money this week. ... Watson software runs on IBM POWER7 servers are optimized to handle the huge number of tasks that must run fast speed to analyze the complex language and provide correct answers to jeopardy! clues. ... Jeopardy! requires forms of reasoning are very sophisticated, using metaphors, puns, and puzzles that go beyond the basic understanding of the language. As a matter of challenge, Jeopardy! stretch the State of the art.

 
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