Man vs App on Jeopardy tonight.
 

Tonight is the debut of "Watson" the Jeopardy playing app.

Here is video of the practice round.

Read this about it the other day, written by Bob Harris, 8-time Jeopardy winner and participant in Jeopardy Masters Tournament. I think it's a good summation of what the event "means", if anything.

So here's something I've been trying to figure out, but haven't seen anything that explains it. How does Watson understand what the categories mean. Especially the punny type categories. Does it have some definition of the kinds of puns and clue structures that Jeopardy has? Does it try to figure it out from the title? Or does it just ignore it and go purely from question content.

Judging from what we saw tonight, I'm guessing option C. Compare Watson's performance in the "APB" category to the decades category. It kicked butt in the APB category since, while the clue structure was weird, it was chock full of keywords and had very straight forward answers. Just plug in the keywords, voila, answer. Whereas the decade category, just plugging in the keywords that are in the clue would perhaps bring up a bunch of dates, but wouldn't lead directly to answering in the form of a decade (and indeed, on a few of them, the Watson display showed it wasn't even considering a decade as an answer).

So, if that's the case, I'm more impressed that it's really trying to figure out the KINDS of answers that it should be looking for, rather than just being fed the category definitions. Nifty!

And they never show enough detail on the server racks on these things. What kind of storage are they using? What about networking. I presume the servers are clustered, and using 1GbE, but is there a separate storage network. Fibre channel? iSCSI? Infiniband? (hahahaha.........okay, I'm the only one who thinks that's funny)

Infiniband!!! Bwah hahahahaha !







Infiniband?

Here is the best source I've seen so far on the underlying hardware.

Assuming it's not a typo, Watson has 4TB of storage (the same as my home PC) and 16TB of memory.

Makes sense I suppose, putting everything is RAM is the only way to get the response time you need. I bet it takes a serious amount of time to boot Watson from a cold start.

WTF! The final jeopardy question was leaked, I'm thinking the fix is in.

Sorry, your question must be phrased in the form of an answer.

This has been so interesting! Watson is killing them. I think the buzzer thing just wasn't calibrated well to allow them to get in.

Watching what Watson gets wrong is so illuminating. Seems the quiz writers put in some extra effort on the Final Jeopardy question and succeeded in flummoxing Watson. Even so, his interestingly particular betting ability kept him out of trouble. The alternate answers chart on the screen including confidence in answers makes this even more fun.

It cracks me up to see the computer scientists in the audience applauding their baby.

Well, unless they built in an uncertainty factor (and I haven't been paying attention much) Watson should essentially always win a buzzer battle. That particular piece of technology (responding immediately to a visual signal) is pretty old and should trigger at microsecond levels.

Out of curiosity, did they eliminate video clues from the game or is Watson up to those as well?

There were no video clues in the first go around.