

How Greg Lindsay Beat IBM's Watson at Jeopardy  - fakelvis
http://www.fastcompany.com/1726969/how-i-beat-ibms-watson-at-jeopardy-3-times

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ugh
This is also mentioned in the article but I think it is worth mentioning
again: Those games were played a year ago. That’s a long, long time ago. IBM
started building Watson (obviously not completely from scratch but as a
Jeopardy contestant) only four years ago.

All those games Watson played during the last year were played with the
express purpose of improving Watson.

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grandpa
Even if Watson doesn't win, the fact that strong players think of him as a
worthy opponent is a huge step forward for the popular perception of AI.

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zck
>So I had to steer him into categories full of what I called "semantic
difficulty"--where the clues’ wordplay would trip him up.

This doesn't seem as useful as it's written here -- it's only useful under two
cases: 1. Not all the clues are chosen before time runs out. 2. The money you
gain here is wagered on a Daily Double, or the money Watson loses here is not
able to be wagered on the Daily Double.

Contestants aren't able to make up categories, to create ones that would cause
Watson trouble; they have to pick from the six on the board.

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jazzyb
After having watched the first half of game one: Another interesting category
that Watson seemed to have a lot of trouble with was a category where all the
answers were decades (1910s, 1920s, etc.). The top answers that Watson came up
with were always years, but he was never that confident, and he never caught
on that the answers were supposed to be a _span_ of years.

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cryptoz
I've read that Watson may ignore the category titles as they are often puns or
confusing text that doesn't help him find an answer. Rather, I think, they may
been seen as more of a source of confusion than help.

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adestefan
The first thing I noticed last night was Watson's strategy of sweeping the
questions across instead of down like is normally played. My instinct tells me
that humans get more context out of the category name and feel comfortable
sticking to one category at a time.

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roel_v
If this machine is already so good, why doesn't IBM offer a system based on
it? (honest question, not suggesting it's not good) It could decimate library
research work, or legal research, by providing high-quality suggestions for
simple phrases.

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cryptoz
They are planning on doing just that. They'll be selling Watson-type QA
machines to business for a few million dollars, starting this summer I think.
I'm not 100% sure about the price and timeline, but they're definitely
planning on making a product out of this.

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zipdog
I wouldn't be surprised if Watson leaves the contestants in tears this time -
not because of some sadness at losing to a machine, but the sheer intellectual
drain of a large number of very quick decisions based on intuition - which is
what I guess it will take to beat the machine.

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adestefan
This was always a winning strategy. Be quick on the buzzer and use the time
you have to come up with an answer. It's the way Ken Jennings kept winning.

