Watson is a question answering system being developed by IBM. There is an excellent background article by the New York Times that explains what Watson is and does. Watson played the test round of Jeopardy with noted Jeopardy player Ken Jennings, whose 73-day winning streak put him in the hall of fame of Jeopary players.
For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world's most advanced "question answering" machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution - "natural language," as computer scientists call it - and respond with a precise, factual answer.
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Nobody ever tackled "Jeopardy!" because experts assumed that even for the latest artificial intelligence, the game was simply too hard: the clues are too puzzling and allusive, and the breadth of trivia is too wide.
Looks like Watson is going to be a pretty competitive player.
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carson wrote:The part that impressed me was that the robot could understand the way the guy spoke rather than have questions input into it via keyboard.
this would be cool indeed
i mean, i'm not surprised it can pose questions related to the first thing that pops up if you'd google his exact words along with wikipedia, but hearing the words AND posing the right questions looks cool
(i wonder, if you'd search his exact words on wikipedia/google and just said "what/who is <page_name>" ...)
that seems like a huge amount of work for no good reason - joe
or, you know, sarcasm - Neelpos
The categories & 'answers' are heavy on puns and allusions which is the hard part. Understanding those are is supposedly the holy grail of AI and separates humans from computers.
All hail our new AI overloads.
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