Watson on Jeopardy

Originally posted by inimalist
so, I watched a clip of the final jeopardy question...

Watson guessed Toronto to a question that was specifically about US cities. This means that Watson either cannot form related connections between concepts like "this city is in this nation", or, is unable to filter items by particular qualities...

I know it is designed more as a language understanding machine, but that seems like a huge flaw... I'd be interested in the process it went through to guess "Toronto"... and why it couldn't restrict its search to only cities located in the US. All I mean, is given the category of "US cities", Toronto has a 100% chance of being the wrong answer.

but such a connection isn't as "simple" as it sounds

the computer would require some sense of "location" to "understand"

it could be just a small glitch, it is interesting though. It selected an answer that had no possibility of being correct

Yeah, but i think it clearly showed that it understood concepts on that tier of complexity, so I find it difficult to think that that was the one thing that they weren't able to get it to do. Let alone that they would put it on the show knowing it didn't have the capability to parse language that was extremely likely to be important to questions asked.

Originally posted by inimalist
so, I watched a clip of the final jeopardy question...

Watson guessed Toronto to a question that was specifically about US cities. This means that Watson either cannot form related connections between concepts like "this city is in this nation", or, is unable to filter items by particular qualities...

I know it is designed more as a language understanding machine, but that seems like a huge flaw... I'd be interested in the process it went through to guess "Toronto"... and why it couldn't restrict its search to only cities located in the US. All I mean, is given the category of "US cities", Toronto has a 100% chance of being the wrong answer.

Originally posted by chomperx9
Toronto cant have a 100% chance of being the wrong answer because there are 3 towns in the US named toronto.

😂 inimalist got owned.

Originally posted by chomperx9
Toronto cant have a 100% chance of being the wrong answer because there are 3 towns in the US named toronto.

I was going to say the same thing but I realized that, in the context of the question, inimalist is still correct: Watson would have a 100% chance of being incorrect if he named a non-US City as his answer. Toronto Canada is definitely not right. (Did he say "Toronto Canada, though?)

Originally posted by dadudemon
I was going to say the same thing but I realized that, in the context of the question, inimalist is still correct: Watson would have a 100% chance of being incorrect if he named a non-US City as his answer. Toronto Canada is definitely not right. (Did he say "Toronto Canada, though?)

Originally posted by chomperx9
He only said Toronto

I just did some major internet researching for the lulz, and the cities in the U.S that have Toronto for name's airports don't have names associated with figures or events from WWII, so I'm gonna say that the robot was wrong. Maybe Skynet won't be getting built after all.... 🙂

Originally posted by Lestov16
I just did some major internet researching for the lulz, and the cities in the U.S that have Toronto for name's airports don't have names associated with figures or events from WWII, so I'm gonna say that the robot was wrong. Maybe Skynet won't be getting built after all.... 🙂

Obviously it was wrong. That's not the issue. The point of contention is if it should have discarded Toronto as an answer automatically because it isn't in the US. There are, in fact, places in the US called Toronto.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
😂 inimalist got owned.

judges would have also accepted:

all incorrect answers had a 100% chance of being wrong 🙂

Originally posted by Lestov16
I just did some major internet researching for the lulz, and the cities in the U.S that have Toronto for name's airports don't have names associated with figures or events from WWII, so I'm gonna say that the robot was wrong. Maybe Skynet won't be getting built after all.... 🙂

Originally posted by chomperx9
just because it got one wrong answer that doesnt mean its not capable of accessing other private network servers and gathering personal data all across the net.

We know it's not able to do that because it's not built to do that (checking the whole internet is not a good method of producing answers anyway) and it was confirmed by the state gaming commission to be unconnected to it. Watson can no more search the internet than you or I can shoot lasers from our eyes.

Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
We know it's not able to do that because it's not built to do that (checking the whole internet is not a good method of producing answers anyway) and it was confirmed by the state gaming commission to be unconnected to it. Watson can no more search the internet than you or I can shoot lasers from our eyes.

This comic, I saw from a friend is made of win and leaves room, yet, for human "win":

I saw one where the categories for Double Jeopardy included "human emotions" and "SQL injection attacks".

lol

http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=2578

Rargh, I read this amazing article about "Watson" about a year or so ago, it went into the specifics of how it works and some alternate possibilities, but I can't find it now.

[edit] Found it: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html?_r=1&hp

Didn't read it again, but at the time it impressed me a lot.