
Ken Jennings on Watson - amichail
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2011/02/17/2011-02-17_ken_jennings_exclusive_oped_jeopardy_champ_says_computer_nemesis_watson_had_unfa.html
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zck
I'd be interested to know if Jennings had any influence on the title -- the
phrase "unfair advantage" isn't used in the text -- he calls it an
"advantage", but "unfair" lends it an entirely different meaning. The article
is a very even-handed discussion of Watson; the headline is needlessly
provocative, and makes Jennings sound like a whiner.

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sciolistse
In his Q&A session after day 1, Jennings said that "I wouldn't call this
unfair...precise timing just happens to be one thing computers are better at
than we humans. It's not like I think Watson should try buzzing in more
erratically just to give homo sapiens a chance."

So my guess is that the daily news had more to do with that title than Ken. It
doesn't seem like him, at any rate.

~~~
m_myers
Judging from the other content advertised on the page, the Daily News is not a
master of subtlety.

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warmfuzzykitten
Died with his buzzer in his hand, Lord Lord...

Nice image by Jennings. But I was surprised to hear him complain about the
buzzer reaction time advantage. In an earlier interview with the Washington
Post he discounted this, saying that the best human players anticipate the
timing while Watson has to wait for the signal.

"On any given night, nearly all the contestants know nearly all the answers,
so it's just a matter of who masters buzzer rhythm the best... But I wouldn't
call this unfair...precise timing just happens to be one thing computers are
better at than we humans. It's not like I think Watson should try buzzing in
more erratically just to give homo sapiens a chance."

[http://live.washingtonpost.com/jeopardy-ken-
jennings.html?hp...](http://live.washingtonpost.com/jeopardy-ken-
jennings.html?hpid=talkbox1)

~~~
sausagefeet
Like sciolistse said I think the "unfair" part was a bit of editorializing.

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CWuestefeld
From a competition perspective, I think it was fair: every player is entitled
to capitalize his own advantages within the rules.

However, I think this would have been more interesting _intellectually_ to
isolate Watson's "thinking", with everything else on a level playing field.

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blhack
In summary: the buzzer.

You could pretty clearly see this if you were watching the game. Ken looked
pretty bummed out every time he clearly knew the answer, but missed buzzing in
by a few milliseconds or so.

Out of curiosity, how does Jeopardy work? Can you buzz in as soon as you know
the answer, or do you have to wait for the host to finish?

~~~
adestefan
Watson received an electronic signal that the buzzers were active. The human
contestants have to time it via Trebek's voice or the light.

~~~
endtime
An electronic signal and a photonic signal ("the light") both travel at the
same speed.

~~~
orborde
An incandescent light might take a nontrivial amount of time (tenth of a
second?) to heat up and light after power is applied.

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hyko
John Henry beat the machine he was up against:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)>

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jhamburger
They should have had a human from the IBM team manning the buzzer based on a
visual cue that Watson is ready to answer. Much like Deep Blue didn't actually
move the chess pieces with a robotic arm.

~~~
blhack
This is a great idea, actually. This was supposed to be a demonstration of
natural language parsing and information retrieval, not a demonstration of a
computers ability to react quickly.

We already know that computers are good at the latter.

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moskie
This makes we wish we could rate Watson's performance against the players in a
way that didn't involve the buzzer. For instance, if Watson and each player
were able to give responses for every single clue in the game, who would have
the highest percentage of correct responses and/or the highest score?

~~~
kenjackson
Except, that's not Jeopardy. That's "Answer these Trivia Questions". A
legitimate game, but not one that is likely to get much viewership.

Everyone misses what should be knocked about Watson. The advantage isn't the
buzzer per se. But rather the text message to get the question and the signal
to indicate the question had been read.

The way it should work in the future is that Watson reads the question from
the screen, listens to Alex, and sees the signal from the light.

Given the standard way Jeopardy text is written though, I suspect that all of
these additional requirements won't change the outcome by much.

Watson is just a better Jeopardy player than humans. Are there other trivia
games where humans are better? Probably so. But people don't watch these other
games in prime time.

~~~
moskie
Well, right, that wouldn't be Jeopardy, but ultimately, I don't really care
about Jeopardy, thus my question. What I (and most of us here, I think) would
find interesting is how Watson's language processing abilities compares to
that of (very smart) people. I don't really care how fast Watson can ring a
buzzer. If there was a way to gauge that, I'd find it interesting.

~~~
kenjackson
I assume you mean "natural" language processing.

For that trivia is the wrong test. It's better to just give it paragraphs and
ask it questions about the paragraph. And of course have increasing levels of
difficult. More like the SAT reading comprehension test.

This would extract how it stores data brought in from structured/unstructed
sources and the actual task of processing natural language.

I suspect it will be a fair bit worse at processing natural language than even
the average person.

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ajscherer
His analogy about Kasparov needing to solve a long division problem is whack.
Buzzing is part of the game of Jeapordy. For all we know he wouldn't have been
a champion in a version of the game that didn't involve buzzing.

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juddlyon
No use in complaining, this was a cool PR stunt. You don't hear the Washington
Generals bitching about the Globetrotters.

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sosuke
I think I remember reading that Watson didn't buzz in until it was sure it had
an answer which was giving the human opponents an advantage because they could
buzz in based of thinking that by the time they are asked for their answer
they can have come up with the correct one.

Looks like they must have overcome that issue.

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ConceptDog
Ugh. He should have skipped writing about this. No matter the validity of his
words, whatever he says will be percieved as sour grapes.

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tejaswiy
What in the world. The challenge was the natural language processing.
Considering that Watson did that part admirably well, complaining about
computers having better reflexes is just silly.

~~~
adestefan
The buzzer timing is a larger part of winning than knowing the answers. I
would say, even though Jennings never does, that it was a huge advantage.

~~~
kenjackson
But the buzzer timing is also part of Jeopardy. It's just a part of the game.
You can change the game to disadvantage the computer, but then why not change
other rules like require all responses to be handwritten using a hand with
human blood flowing through it to a pumping heart, which is connected to a
working human brain.

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protomyth
I'd be more impressed by this massive IBM advertisement, if the computer
received its information the exact way the other contestants did (verbally /
visually looking at screen).

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ddlatham
It wouldn't make much difference. OCR on the text on the screen would be fine.

If it had to do speech recognition for Alex Trebek, that would make it more
difficult.

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protomyth
Yep, it would be more difficult and probably make its buzzer reaction time a
little more "honest".

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kooshball
the OCR would be nearly perfect since there's very little variation in the way
the text is displayed. The voice part wouldn't matter since the all top level
players use the visual clue to determine the answer long before Trebek
finishes reading it.

