"I expected Watson's bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match: The computer's techniques for unraveling Jeopardy clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson's case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words. It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels "sure" enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing."
No sour grapes here, he sounds genuinely fascinated by the computer that beat him.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Ken Jennings discusses Watson
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1 comment:
In my mind Ken still wins. He's a human.
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