

Ask IBM's Watson Research Team Anything - ww520
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/fnfg3/by_request_we_are_the_ibm_research_team_that/

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petercooper
This is either a question or a suggestion but.. is there (or can there be) a
more technical AMA-type site for engineers and scientists? I like Reddit but I
can't help but feel the right person could curate the questions better for
technical and scientific stuff rather than relying on the sort of voting
patterns Reddit is susceptible to.

Frequent intelligently curated but publicly driven (i.e. not just
"interviews") AMAs with scientists and teams working on cool stuff would make
for great reading. Even AMAs with the tech teams of the startups we all know
and love on HN would be a great start.

I'd do it (the "if you're gunna complain.." approach) but I'm not well enough
connected. Imagine someone like Andrew Warner or pg (who could pretty much get
anyone at the table) curating a site like that. It'd be a must-visit to both
ask questions _and_ read the answers.

UPDATE: Or is this essentially Quora I've reinvented?

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Joakal
Reddit's solution to that is to create your own subreddit and effectively
become elitist about what's allowed. Hence a lot of comments as to Reddit
demographic issues is met with "remove default subreddits".

Quora is similar but catered to a smaller audience I assume. Both places have
moderators but I don't know if either can control the answers (On reddit, only
moderators can).

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ugh
That solution doesn’t work for AMAs which will (like this one) inevitably
attract much attention.

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goalieca
I was rather disappointed that a lot of the top rated questions were knee-jerk
or obvious.

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solipsist
I am under the impression that the actual IBM has not responded to any of the
questions yet. Any knee-jerk or obvious answers would be from your typical
Reddit user.

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itg
They will answer the ten most popular questions next tuesday.

As much as I love Reddit sometimes, a good number of the upvoted questions are
disappointing although not unexpected.

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VladRussian
>They will answer

or Watson?

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mikeklaas
I'd rather play "Ask Watson Anything"

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nostromo
I wish they would put him up as a webapp. It may not be economical to have a
supercomputer online that can only answer one question at a time -- but they
might find enough overlap that he could start caching frequent requests or
even queuing requests as necessary. Or better yet, scale slowly by invite
only.

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Tyrant505
Why do you assume he can only answer one question at a time?

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eggnet
It would have been better phrased as: how many questions per second can watson
handle.

And I think the answer is, not a whole lot, maybe even less than 1.

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amichail
Did this competition hurt Jeopardy in general because it is now obvious that
the winner is mostly decided by buzzer skills among top players?

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Herring
Landmark AI event, and you guys are worrying about buzzer speed. *sigh

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RickHull
That's because the _buzzer competition_ confounds the _knowledge competition_.
It's a shame, really.

But I'm sure IBM is happy.

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JunkDNA
Can you explain why it is you think that the knowledge part is confounded? If
Watson is fast but incorrect, it's a failure.

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defen
A Watson that knows 70% of the answers will beat a human who knows 90% of the
answers, purely due to better reflexes. Of course, buzzer skill is partly how
KenJen won so many games, so I'm not complaining. Just not AS impressed by
Watson as some people.

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JunkDNA
Except that it's not just reflexes. Watson has to compute the answer before
the humans. That's no small task. This video is a great technical explanation
of how it works:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3G2H3DZ8rNc&feature=youtube_gdata_player)

