

Humanity Lost on Jeopardy - dreeves
http://messymatters.com/watson

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dreeves
Short version:

1\. Watson has an unfair advantage in reaction time and Ken and Brad have an
unfair advantage in timing their button presses. On balance the buzzer surely
favors Watson though. An obvious rule tweak would eliminate this issue.

2\. Humans are still vastly better at understanding what is being asked and
vastly worse at knowing the answer.

My verdict: This is super impressive and will be super useful. It might not
even be too hyperbolic to anticipate this saving lives or otherwise making the
world awesomer. Still, in terms of true natural language understanding —
having a normal conversation with a computer — this seems to be pretty
minuscule progress.

