Watson as you pass the danger, but shows weakness (NewsFactor)

On the second day of his appearance in TV SHOW Jeopardy, IBM Watson supercomputer devastated its human opponents. But even Watson, with 90 IBM Power 750 servers, have weak points.

On Tuesday, the world's smartest Computer blew past his opponents based on carbon, Ken Jennings samples and Brad Rutter. At the conclusion of the evening, the computer has racked up $ 35,734 while Rutter had $ 10,400 $ 4800 and Jennings. At the end of Monday's game, Watson was linked with Rutter $ 5,000 each, with Jennings in 2000 dollars. The game ends Wednesday.

Is fundamentally different from humans

The winner gets $ 1 million. As Watson is not designed for shopping, IBM will donate the prize to charity if he wins his creation. The two men said they'll donate half if they manage to pull off on Wednesday.

Eric Nyberg, Carnegie Mellon University Professor of computer science who led a CMU team that helped IBM, commented that Watson's answers "fundamentally different" from human beings. For example, a competitor can buzz and takes few seconds to respond, while Watson will buzz only when you have a high degree of confidence that the answer is correct. Watson may develop and evaluate two million pages of information in three seconds. But if the question is short, Watson is a disadvantage, because it takes three seconds to complete on every issue.

Most difficult questions can throw out Watson. In a brief moment of happiness for human whiffed badly partisans, Watson on final Jeopardy Tuesday. The category was the city of United States, and the symptom response was: "largest airport of the city is named after a hero of World War II; the second largest, for a battle of World War II. " The correct answer was "what is Chicago?" Both humans responded correctly. Watson, who never spent much time in airports, much less U.S. ones, replied "what is the Toronto?"

On his blog smarter planet, IBM David Ferruci, project manager, Watson was quoted as saying that the computer had learned the names of the category "only weakly suggest the type of answer that is expected and, therefore, the machine would despise their meanings." Furthermore, he noted, there are cities in the United States called Toronto and Toronto, Canada has an American League baseball team.

Career Post-Jeopardy Watson

But the good news for Terminator-wannabes is that Watson is continuously learning how categories work in danger. He also learned to be wary of betting. As his level of confidence for the final Jeopardy question of Tuesday was low, it only bet $ 947 gain riled.

On the blog of IBM, IBM Steven Hamm noticed some of the uses for intelligence Watson after calm from the fame of danger. In medicine, he predicted, "a patient a doctor can describe a certain symptom or a high level of pain, which on the surface it may seem like an important clue to the cause of the noise." But could discover Watson, sifting through and its huge repository of data, another symptom might be the real key for diagnosis of weighing.

Other applications might include sifting through case law relevant to find previous, helping governments examine the requests from clients or social services, help intelligence agencies in the analysis of information flows, or reach out to the call center.

IBM Watson wins the danger, humans Rally back

Super computer IBM, Watson came out victorious during the danger Wednesday, but not before former exposure game samples Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter gathered a formidable defence. In the end, however, humans were no match for Watson, who has won with a benefit of $ 77,147 Commander after three days of play. Jennings has taken second place to $ 24,000 and Rutter was third with $ 21,600. "For one welcome our new computer feudal lords," Jennings jokingly wrote in his final Jeopardy answer during the transmission of Wednesday. The challenge of the risk of three-night was recorded in January at the IBM t. j. Watson Research Laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York.

As victor, Watson takes home a prize of 1 million dollars, that IBM intends to donate to the vision of the world and the World Community Grid. Jennings and Rutter will donate 50 percent of their winnings to separate charity.

Watson commands then stumbles

At the beginning of the broadcast on Wednesday, seemed as if Watson was about to destroy his rivals human again. But the tide turned with a category that has asked to be the name of an actor/director in film titles. Rutter and Jennings seemed to be jumping on buzzer before knowing the answer; confident they would be able to answer these questions on the spot. The strategy worked, and after the first 15 questions, the score (in terms of clues answered) was Watson 7, Jennings 4 and 3 Rutter. Watson and Rutter also each received a clue.

Watson gets PWNED

Things seemed to be getting worse for Watson during the next 15 clues. The computer managed only 3 answers Watson Jennings ' 6 and 5 Rutter. Watson and Jennings both responded to a question incorrectly during this tour.

Watson has stumbled upon a variety of topics from policy to vague knowledge sections daily price hike of USA Today in 2008. Watson has failed to respond, for example, that Slovenia is only former Yugoslav Republic in the European Union. The computer had Slovenia as one of its three likely answers, but its for sure about the correct answer was not high enough. Watson replied, "what is the Serbia?"--a country which is not in the European Union. Rutter replied this clue and Jennings does not constitute a hazard to guess.

After the first 30 Jeopardy clues Jennings and Watson everyone had correctly answered 10 and Rutter was close behind with 8, with two clues, getting wrong answers from competitors.

Man In danger

Despite the shortcomings of Watson in the danger of regulating the first round, the super computer bounced back during Wednesday's double jeopardy. Watson has taken an initiative Commander with 18 correct answers Jennings ' 7 and 4 Rutter. Watson replied also mistakenly double daily demand during the turn.

After that final was jeopardised where all three competitors responded correctly that Dracula by Bram Stoker was inspired by an account William Wilkinson of the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. '

The takeaway

Now that the battle is over there will be endless discussions about whether this was a fight and if Watson had an advantage or not in its ability to turn on the beep faster and more consistently than Jennings and Rutter. And while it's fun to see the IBM challenge of danger as a classic man vs. machine battle, this competition has never been just about the danger.

Watson is a significant leap in capacity of a machine to understand the context in human language. How IBM has said on several occasions, the goal was to create a self-aware super computer that can run amok like HAL 9000 from 2001: a space Odyssey or Skynet from Terminator. But a question and answer machine as the ship's computer on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

But we're not quite yet. To build Watson, IBM used 200 million pages of content stored on up to 4 terabytes of disk space, as 16 terabytes of memory (reports have varied), approximately 2,800 processor cores and about 6 million of rules to determine the best answers. Watson took 10 racks of servers, each with 10 IBM Power 750 and two large refrigeration unit that was hosted in own room IBM Yorktown Heights campus. Everything for a computer language that can be analyzed via a text file and not through voice-based input as Star Trek computer does.

Voice-activated or not, IBM believes that the technology behind Watson can be applied to a variety of fields, particularly to medicine. The company plans to announce Thursday a joint project with Columbia University and the University of Maryland to create a physician's Assistant cybernetic technology Watson, according to the New York Times. IBM will also work with Nuance Communications to include speech recognition for the new project doctor--a feature that could be ready by the end of 2012.

It is a world of exciting possibilities for Watson technology, especially when in the area of our lives one day we will be able to walk to a computer and say, "Tea. Earl Grey, hot ".

For a look of Watson and philosophical questions puts the existence of this super computer, check out A Smarter Planet blog post by IBM on Jeopardy day 3.

Connect with Ian Paul (@ ianpaul) and Today @ PCWorld on Twitter for the latest technology news and analysis.

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 ...
(IBM)

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.
...
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.
...
"What is the class?" Mr. Rutter said.
...
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.
...
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.

 
And finally ...
Find the shortest path between two Wikipedia articles

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