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Topic: IBM AI plays Jeopardy (Read 10612 times) |
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Fritzlein
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IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« on: Jul 16th, 2010, 8:36am » |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html
Bad news folks. Deep down I have long cherished a hope that Arimaa would eventually attract the attention of IBM. Maybe not right away, maybe not until the player base grows and the Arimaa Challenge remains unconquered through 2020, but some day. Particularly if the man/machine rating gap happened to be even bigger in 2020 than it is today, say 800 rating points instead of 500, perhaps IBM would think Arimaa was interesting enough to take on.
Alas, my hopes, faint and long-term though they were, have been crushed. IBM has now used a supercomputer to create a competent Jeopardy player. Apparently they aren't quite up to Ken Jennings' level yet, but they can beat most Jeopardy contestants already, and are planning a televised showdown with past champions.
Even if IBM loses now, they will focus all their "long-shot game-playing" attention on Jeopardy, because it is ten times cooler than playing mere board games. Whether or not IBM could beat the human Arimaa champion in 2021 with a supercomputer, everyone will assume they could, because Deep Blue beat Kasparov. Been there, done that. Jeopardy, on the other hand, is new, exciting, and scary. When AI is doing cool stuff like that, no AI money will ever chase Arimaa.
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rbarreira
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #1 on: Jul 16th, 2010, 9:04am » |
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That is really impressive when you see the kinds of problems Watson managed to solve.
PS: The people who thought Deep Blue was cheating at chess are going to have a field day with this.
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Arimabuff
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #2 on: Jul 16th, 2010, 10:21am » |
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What's so tricky about Jeopardy? It's just a stupid question/answer game with the requisite that you have to formulate the answer as a question, a reverse trivial pursuit so to speak. Frankly I have never watched much of this because I find it a tad annoying but anyway, I don't see what the fuss is all about. Put everything trivia like in a database plus a program that will put the data in the form of a question (how complicated can it be?) and voilà!
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Fritzlein
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #3 on: Jul 16th, 2010, 11:02am » |
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Answering in the form of a question is not the major issue. The trick is understanding what information is being fished for. Give the article a read. It explains the gap between questions of a predefined form such as "What is the capital of Denmark?" and free-form questions involving implications like, "What was relatively important, compared to knowledge, to relativity's founder?"
The latter question can be answered by someone who knows that Einstein founded the theory of Relativity and also knows that Einstein said "Imagination is more important than knowledge," but is isn't something that can be stuffed in a database in advance.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 16th, 2010, 11:06am by Fritzlein » |
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Hirocon
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #4 on: Jul 16th, 2010, 3:08pm » |
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I'm still waiting for a team of humanoid robots that can beat a human team at soccer (aka football).
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The_Jeh
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #5 on: Jul 16th, 2010, 4:46pm » |
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on Jul 16th, 2010, 10:21am, Arimabuff wrote:| It's just a stupid question/answer game with the requisite that you have to formulate the answer as a question, a reverse trivial pursuit so to speak. Frankly I have never watched much of this because I find it a tad annoying but anyway, |
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Take it back! It's the greatest quiz show of all time. I watch it religiously. 
Just as a bit of trivia - the original reason Jeopardy made contestants give answers in the form of questions was to poke fun at the quiz show scandals that came before it in the 1950's. It was found that producers had been rigging games by giving contestants the answers. So, why not make them give the questions instead? As it turns out, it really gave the game a great flow.
Anyway, I'm impressed that with so much knowledge to process a computer could still answer in 6 or 7 seconds.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 16th, 2010, 4:53pm by The_Jeh » |
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rbarreira
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #6 on: Jul 16th, 2010, 9:33pm » |
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on Jul 16th, 2010, 3:08pm, Hirocon wrote:| I'm still waiting for a team of humanoid robots that can beat a human team at soccer (aka football). |
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That doesn't need any AI, as long as you allow robots which move very fast 
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Hirocon
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #7 on: Jul 16th, 2010, 9:56pm » |
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Getting humanoid robots to move very fast requires a lot of AI; in fact in requires a lot more AI than in takes to play chess. See:
RoboCup
Robocup Soccer 2010 Germany / Germany (Final)
That was state-of-the-art earlier this year, and those robots were not nearly as agile or fast as humans.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 16th, 2010, 10:03pm by Hirocon » |
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rbarreira
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #8 on: Jul 16th, 2010, 10:00pm » |
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I think that's more robotics/mechanics than AI. Sure, if your mechanical components are not very good you need more AI (as is the case with Robocup teams).
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| « Last Edit: Jul 16th, 2010, 10:00pm by rbarreira » |
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Arimabuff
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #9 on: Jul 17th, 2010, 10:08am » |
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on Jul 16th, 2010, 4:46pm, The_Jeh wrote:
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Anyway, I'm impressed that with so much knowledge to process a computer could still answer in 6 or 7 seconds. |
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Well the delay to access information in a database is pretty much a logarithmic (like) function of its volume that is why you can access information on the net in only a fraction of a second even though there are billions of pages to choose from. I believe that most of the 6 sec. You speak of is spent making complicated connections between fragments of data as in a compounded question/answer like the one Fritz, talked about. I’ve seen a program that could create a complex cross word puzzle, so much so in fact that it was beyond the reach of the best cross word puzzle makers in the world! And the program would do it in a few SECONDS!!! Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
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Arimabuff
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #10 on: Jul 17th, 2010, 10:24am » |
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on Jul 16th, 2010, 11:02am, Fritzlein wrote:Answering in the form of a question is not the major issue. The trick is understanding what information is being fished for. Give the article a read. It explains the gap between questions of a predefined form such as "What is the capital of Denmark?" and free-form questions involving implications like, "What was relatively important, compared to knowledge, to relativity's founder?"
The latter question can be answered by someone who knows that Einstein founded the theory of Relativity and also knows that Einstein said "Imagination is more important than knowledge," but is isn't something that can be stuffed in a database in advance. |
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I think it’s much less difficult than is seems. A program can analyze an expression like "relativity's founder" even though it's imprecise and incorrect, but a program can work with imprecise and incorrect data. Your word processor does it all the time when it corrects your spelling and your grammar, for example. So the program could probably get Einstein out of that expression and then do a keyword search on every quote that has ever been attributed to Einstein. I bet that there aren’t many that contain the words "important" and "knowledge" etc... That doesn't look too complicated to me.
I mean we already have programs that do amazing searches on approximate and sometimes even WRONG keywords and their synonyms in record time don't we?
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| « Last Edit: Jul 17th, 2010, 10:27am by Arimabuff » |
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RonWeasley
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #11 on: Jul 18th, 2010, 3:57pm » |
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What is a fast internet search engine?
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omar
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #12 on: Jul 21st, 2010, 6:06pm » |
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Thanks for sharing that interesting story with us Karl.
I don't expect IBM to ever be interested in the Arimaa Challenge; especially since the challenge does not allow using supercomputers. I think part of IBM's reason for taking on chess and now Jeopardy is to showcase their supercomputers.
Although IBM may never try for the Arimaa challenge, the work they are doing here with Jeopardy could potentially be applied to Arimaa. In a way they are tackling the problem of not being able to generate or store a full position to move (question to answer in Jeopardy) lookup table by using statistical data mining on a large data set of information (like the Arimaa games archive). I think Toby has already started down this path with his bot GnoBot. Who knows maybe it will work If it does, it will be a very different approach than the conventional tree search approach.
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| « Last Edit: Jul 21st, 2010, 6:07pm by omar » |
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The_Jeh
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #13 on: Feb 14th, 2011, 10:44am » |
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I justed wanted to remind everybody that today, tomorrow, and Wednesday the duel among IBM's Watson, Ken Jennings, and Brad Rutter will be airing. I believe Watson already won a 15-question mini-game against the two, in which no one answered incorrectly but Watson buzzed in more quickly.
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| « Last Edit: Feb 14th, 2011, 10:49am by The_Jeh » |
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ddyer
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #14 on: Feb 14th, 2011, 1:39pm » |
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From an AI standpoint, the interesting thing about Watson is that it solves the "Jeopordy" problem in the same way that humans do. It interprets an ambiguous question and weighs many factors to decide on both the meaning of the question and the probable correctness of many answers, and even judges its own certainty of it's result.
That is light years away from the methods used to play traditional board games like chess or Arimaa.
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visit my game site: http://www.boardspace.net/
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