Feb
16
2011

Creators: Watson has no speed advantage as it crushes humans in Jeopardy



Watson, the computer built by IBM to play Jeopardy, outdid itself in the second half of its first official game against champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson finished with $35,734 to Rutter’s $10,400 and Jenning’s $4,800, despite coming up with a very wrong answer to what appeared to be a fairly straightforward final Jeopardy question on the topic of “US Cities.”

The answer was, “Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle.” Both Jennings and Rutter got the correct question— “What is Chicago?”— while Watson put down “What is Toronto???” Dr. Chris Welty, who worked on the algorithms team during Watson’s development, said that the phrasing of the question demonstrated again Watson’s difficulty with implicit meanings and how quickly it can become tough for the computer to sort out what type of question the answer is looking for.

Read the rest of this article...

Read the comments on this post


See the original article here:
Creators: Watson has no speed advantage as it crushes humans in Jeopardy

Written by Staff in: Ars Technica | Tags: , , , ,

No Comments

Comments are closed.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL


adsense

Cool-O-Rama: News for Geeks