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Topic: IBM AI plays Jeopardy (Read 10615 times) |
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Fritzlein
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #15 on: Feb 14th, 2011, 3:32pm » |
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on Feb 14th, 2011, 1:39pm, ddyer wrote:| That is light years away from the methods used to play traditional board games like chess or Arimaa. |
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Hmmm... I was just wondering whether there is some parallel on an abstract plane. In both chess and Jeopardy the computer spends a lot of time on worthless answers. There is the "answer generation" part of Watson (like search in computer chess) and the "answer assessment" part of Watson (like static position evaluation in chess). Of course it seems to me that both generating answers and evaluating answers for Jeopardy questions would be harder problems than the analogous bits of chess engines, but somehow it seems to me that there is a structural similarity.
Chess programs have been disparaged as being dumb and fast, but for all we know, this is how our own brains work without our knowing it. Maybe when someone asks, "Who was president before Kennedy?", our brains try out and reject a million different answers without our being aware that it is going on, because all that we eventually become conscious of is the most probable answer that passes plausibility filters and rises to the top.
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omar
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #16 on: Feb 14th, 2011, 6:52pm » |
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I watched the show today. Watson was quite impressive. IBM should consider putting it online to allow people to ask it questions.
on Jul 16th, 2010, 8:36am, Fritzlein wrote:
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.
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Maybe IBM already looked at Arimaa and decided it was too difficult 
https://www-927.ibm.com/ibm/cas/hspc/Profiles/People/profiles.shtml#Newb orn
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aaaa
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #17 on: Feb 14th, 2011, 7:57pm » |
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The first episode has been put on YouTube:
Part 1
Part 2
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rbarreira
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #19 on: Feb 16th, 2011, 5:05am » |
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Apparently lots of people are complaining that Watson's advantage seems to be more in the button pressing time than in knowing the answers.
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RonWeasley
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #20 on: Feb 16th, 2011, 7:21am » |
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Even with the button pressing advantage, I'm still impressed with Watson.
One thing bothering me is IBM trying to oversell the technology. At one point they were saying a Watson-like system could replace doctors for medical diagnosis. No it can't. However, it can be very helpful in assisting doctors. On a related note, IBM seems to be saying the Watson technology is new. It's not. It's just bigger and impressively general. Specialized decision aid systems have been around for about twenty years. I'm still impressed, but I hate seeing the executives mislead the public.
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Adanac
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #21 on: Feb 16th, 2011, 9:53am » |
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on Feb 16th, 2011, 7:21am, RonWeasley wrote:Even with the button pressing advantage, I'm still impressed with Watson.
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I was also very impressed with Watson's performance. I don't know much about AI but I would have intuitively expected that the Arimaa Challenge would be won before the best Jeopardy contestants were defeated. And I was surprised to learn that I don't live in a U.S. city 
I think this highly publicized event will help Arimaa in the long-run especially if we can win the Arimaa Challenge 9-0 again. It would be great to tell the world "Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings couldn't stop Watson but 3 Arimaa players trounced bot_whatever 9-0".
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| « Last Edit: Feb 16th, 2011, 9:55am by Adanac » |
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Fritzlein
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #22 on: Feb 16th, 2011, 12:47pm » |
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on Feb 16th, 2011, 9:53am, Adanac wrote:| I think this highly publicized event will help Arimaa in the long-run especially if we can win the Arimaa Challenge 9-0 again. It would be great to tell the world "Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings couldn't stop Watson but 3 Arimaa players trounced bot_whatever 9-0". |
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I hope this is the public reaction, as opposed to: "IBM could master Arimaa any time they wanted to (just like they did with chess and Jeopardy), but the Arimaa Challenge rules prevent them from competing."
Hopefully, if humans are still way ahead in 2020 when the Arimaa Challenge expires, the community will have grown enough that the question becomes interesting apart from Omar's money. In that case, people might start building/measuring Arimaa engines on more powerful hardware.
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mistre
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #23 on: Feb 16th, 2011, 1:34pm » |
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Watched it last night. While it was neat in concept, the whole contest seems unfair because of the reaction time issue. Watson can obviously buzz in faster the human participants (I guarantee that they knew at least 80% of the questions based on their previous Jeopardy appearances).
Still, I was impressed with the results. It just didn't make for a very exciting match. Maybe tonight will be better.
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RonWeasley
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #24 on: Feb 17th, 2011, 8:10am » |
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on Feb 16th, 2011, 7:21am, RonWeasley wrote:Even with the button pressing advantage, I'm still impressed with Watson.
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I'm also impressed with Emma Watson. She looks very much like the real Hermione.
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mistre
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #25 on: Feb 17th, 2011, 8:31am » |
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Definitely more entertaining last night. Ken must have been taking button pushing lessons as he was able to buzz in more frequently. Loved his sense of humor at the end to - "I for one welcome our new computer overlords".
In what year will we being saying the same about Arimaa??
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| « Last Edit: Feb 17th, 2011, 8:41am by mistre » |
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arimaa_master
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #26 on: Feb 17th, 2011, 9:58am » |
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on Feb 17th, 2011, 8:10am, RonWeasley wrote:
I'm also impressed with Emma Watson. She looks very much like the real Hermione. |
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LOL
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Fritzlein
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #27 on: Feb 17th, 2011, 10:25am » |
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on Feb 17th, 2011, 8:10am, RonWeasley wrote:| I'm also impressed with Emma Watson. |
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It's hard not to be impressed impressed with Emma Watson, unless you're looking with your eyes closed.
on Feb 16th, 2011, 9:53am, Adanac wrote:| I think this highly publicized event will help Arimaa in the long-run[...] |
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Apparently it has already helped Arimaa in the short run; witness the latest message in the "Say Hello" thread.
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omar
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #28 on: Feb 17th, 2011, 1:50pm » |
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Wow, IBM has done it again. It feels like 1997 again when I read all the hype in the media about this. No doubt this is a major accomplishment. Although I didn't like the fact that Watson did have some advantages with being given the text of the question immediately and being able to press the buzzer so quickly. It would have been a more interesting contest if Watson had to use speech recognition to get the questions and literally use a mechanical hand to press the buzzer
The technology coming from this project, though is quite interesting and could have immediate applications. Sounds like IBM is planning to use it to assist doctors with diagnosing patients. I hope they also setup a 'Ask Watson' site and allow people to ask it questions.
I think it might even have some long term implications for Arimaa and other games. It shows that one doesn't really have to understand the meaning to come up with a good answer if you have a huge knowledge base available. In the context of game playing, programs that use the conventional tree search approach are essentially trying to understand the meaning of the position and come up with an answer all on their own. The other extreme is when they use an opening or endgame book (essentially a huge knowledge base) to just lookup the response in a brain dead way. But the Watson project suggests that their may be a good middle ground. What if an Arimaa playing program maintained a knowledge base of all the Arimaa games and used a similarity match to identify previous positions similar to the current position and looked at the kind of moves that lead to wins in previous games and picked a similar move available from the current position after doing a quick 2 ply check to make sure the move is not an obvious blunder. Such an approach would probably not be very successful initially compared to the current best bots, but it may eventually be able to reach a higher level of play. This approach to playing would certainly be closer to how humans play.
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The_Jeh
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Re: IBM AI plays Jeopardy
« Reply #29 on: Feb 17th, 2011, 1:57pm » |
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Alex Trebek: "This is the best opening move in a game of Arimaa."
Watson: "What is...."
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