We had a great time last night watching Watson take on two humans in a round of Jeopardy. Or at least, I had a great time. The wife and her sister weren’t quite as into it as I was, but they watched it just the same.Here’s a recap:
- The show did a great job explaining what was happening (they burned half the episode on explanations).
- It’s interesting how most people don’t understand what the true challenge of this event is (even techies) – Watson has huge volumes of information (he knows a lot of stuff), but the real challenge is understanding the meaning behind a question. In other words, it’s an understanding/comprehension challenge, not a fact challenge.
- IBM came up with a really neat tool that showed the audience how Watson was playing the game. They would show the top three answers he came up with and a confidence interval. Watson would buzz in with the highest rated answer that crossed the confidence interval. If none of the answers made it across the threshold, he wouldn’t buzz in.
- Alex Trebek gave a tour of the datacenter which had ten-ish racks of IBM servers. The size of the install was very surprising to our non-technical viewers.
- Watson glows green when he’s confident in his answers, and when he gets one wrong, he glows orange. This feature was a big hit at our house.
- Two perfect examples came to light exposing the difficulty of this challenge. One question made references to the Harry Potter world and a dark lord who challenged him. It was clearly a Harry Potter question due to the contextual clues, but the answer was “Lord Voldemort”. Watson answered “Harry Potter”, but his second choice answer was “Lord Voldemort”. A human who understood the meaning of the question would never have answered in that way. The second occasion involved Jennings answering “the twenties” to a question, which was wrong. Watson buzzed in right after him and answered, “the twenties,” which no human would ever do.
One question I had was if the text transfer of the questions happens in step with Alex Trebek’s reading of them. Does it happen character by character or does Watson get a few precious seconds while humans are reading the screens? Conspiracy theorists would probably ask how Watson’s first choice was an 800 dollar question (unusual) and he hit the daily double immediately, but it could be part of the IBM team’s strategy.All in all, that was probably the most fun I’ve had watching a TV game show. Looking forward to the next two episodes.
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