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back to article Watson? Commercial – not super – computer

Now that IBM’s Watson has pounded the best human Jeopardy competitors into a fine slurry, let’s take stock. Our human proxies took their ass-kicking in good spirits, with Ken Jennings writing on his ‘Final Jeopardy’ card, “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.” (For the sake of adding a bit more inane trivia, the …

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    1. the old rang
      Reply Icon
      WTF?

      Until ... is the answer...

      Until more people understand the question you are seemingly worried about, there will be very little understanding of the question.

      Most of your belief and fear, at this time, is predicated on a ficticious image.

      Computers can not, at this time, take over the world. It is just as unlikely that golems powered by large racks of abaci will.

      At this time, they are still just tools, used to manipulate data. And too often deliberately being manipulated themselves to give wrong answers. (sic Global warming computer models were required to come up with the answer they wanted or the data was adjusted... every time at all locations controled by the cadre)

      The question should be, about how it can be done, if it can be done. Understanding that it, eventully, will come to pass, that there will be sentient, self-replicting machines. The problem is understanding, you will probably not be around for the unveiling. Once the machine gets to a certain point, it will happen quicker, but, it is no where near there, now.

      Will they become our masters? For now, computer masters are the least of your worries. We have people in power that are trying to do that, with no need of computers.

      Don't ignore computer development. Watch it and be marveled. But, there is much more out there you should not ignore... believe me

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    2. Lewis Mettler
      Reply Icon
      Go

      Watson did make some real mistakes

      On the second day the final question was to name a US City that had their main airport named after a war hero and the second after a battle in WW II. (As I recall)

      Watson piked "Toronto". Toranto? Since when is Toronto a US City?

      Maybe there is a city named Toronto in the US. But, I doubt it has two airports.

      But, give the guy a break. He did pretty much snow the humans.

      Watson is a wonderful acheivement. There is no question about that.

      We really only need to begin to worry when the answers come up and we have no idea if it is right or wrong. Then we have a problem.

      In the meantime there are many industries where Watson type capabilities can do wonders for us. Medical diagnosis being one critical one. Critical because lives are at risk. Hopefully a real doctor will get the answer and question it before anyone is injected.

      If you have seen House on the Fox network you know how difficult it can be to diagnois an illness. And even on the super show to hero makes numerios mistakes before time runs out and the patient has to either die or be saved. Of course, those mistakes are based upon incomplete or even changing information. Just like the real world. Give Watson incomplete or incorrect information and he will fail as well.

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      1. Robert A. Rosenberg
        Reply Icon

        No Toronto Airport in the US

        What you are missing is that this was a Final Jeopardy Question. Thus the need to supply SOME answer. The fact that Watson KNEW the answer was wrong (and would have not triggered a Buzz in the standard rounds) was signaled by two things with the answer. First was the string of ?s after the Toronto. Second was the low bid (in the $900s) for the answer.

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      2. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Stop

        @Lewis Mettler

        "Maybe there is a city named Toronto in the US. But, I doubt it has two airports."

        Yes there is, its in Ohio, and it has three airfields within a 10 mile Radius. Eddie Dew Meml Airpark, Herron Airport and Jefferson County Airpark.

        What really astounds me about this answer was how it could have eliminated Chicago as a possiblity..

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Read Super Crunchers

    Be very wary of a commercial competitive society which can predict humands better than humans can. A lot of services rely on "on average" behavior and a lack of knowledge. Insurance being the typical example - if the computer can accurately predict who will get ill and who will not, why insure the ones which are going to get ill - they will lose the insurance company money.

    Keep data private - much of society relies on it - more than most people think. That said - it's a good piece of tech - I just get worried they will get used for less benign uses.

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  3. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Big Brother

    "Off-the-shelf gear ‘gets’ humans"

    We already have this with the imperial COTS-based drone armada based in Af/Pak.

    In the same vein, wait until state gets ahold of those tasty algorithms. Just connect it to the various databases and you will be visited by blue-clad goons for aggravated terrorist pedophilia with intention to evade taxes at least once a month.

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  4. jsides

    interesting, but ...

    Informative article. I'd just quibble with the idea that it's not a supercomputer and it's not doing search. As you say, " We human types are ambiguous. We have nearly endless ways to say the same thing. Our statements and questions are unstructured, and must be interpreted through the context in which they’re made."

    To the majority of English speakers, a system that can beat humans is "super." As wikipedia says, the definition of super is rather fluid. I believe your point is that Watson is not a demonstration of raw processing power, which is a defining supercomputer trait. But if I may speak as a member of the great unwashed masses, Watson demonstrated a power not previously seen so I think one could argue that it expands the definition of supercomputer.

    As for search, Watson goes into a database and returns an answer. I can't fault journalists for considering that search. It's taken search to a new level.

    Again, the article was informative. My point, if I have one, is that language is consensus of meaning. To those of us without engineering degrees, this was super and it was search.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Big deal?

    I'm not impressed by what IBM did. For one thing they were able to modify their program at the end of each day. They had two weeks to download as much information as they could from the Internet, including the entire Encyclopedia Britannica. At best, they wrote, modified as needed, a very expensive search engine.

    Per NOVA's special on this story, when IBM showed the executives of Jeopardy the new computer they had built, it failed miserably. They had to modify the program several times in order to beat normal contestants.

    Once they got on the show they needed to modify it yet again in order to beat the two "best" of Jeopardy. And to top it all off, the questions on Jeopardy are standardized, meaning that they are designed within a specific parameter which is easy for IBM to design a program to operate within that specific parameter.

    Humans are much more complex and the questions could have been made even more vague and tricky which would have required much more time and resources for IBM to compete.

    I am not impressed and no, we aren't going to be over run by computer overlords.

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    what rubbish

    "t’s not a supercomputer. It’s a commercial system"?

    I WILL BE DAMNED IF a supercomputer is not a commercial system,

    you can buy a supercomputer, man !

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  7. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Unhappy

    That reminds me....

    ...whatever happened to Doug Lenat's CYC?

    Sank without a trace?

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  8. ArkhamNative
    Terminator

    SkyNet. Human GIGO.

    2 things:

    "Watson is the best recent example of a machine crossing over the divide between human and machine-style thinking." -- Horrifically scary if true, but what I think you meant was "...best example of humans creating algorithms that bridge the divide between human and computer information processing."

    “There already are humans kept as pets by machines - they're called ‘iPhone owners!’” - very cliquish and droll, but iPhones are nothing compared to our true overlords: television.

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    super is as super does

    Dan Olds, there are computers with far less compute capability than this on the supercomputer lists. It shouldn't grate you that something many, if not most would classify as a supercomputer is called one. Moreoever, you can't honestly say the computer doesn't do searches, even qualifying it with how we conventionally mean it. You described exactly a search process and it's similar to how internet information is searched in major search engines. You can say that it doesn't just do searches.

    What a silly rant about some blurry semantic lines that one reg columnist seems to think are built like the wall of china around his own little interpretations of things.

    That said, I wholeheartedly agree that the general press does seem to convey the description of this accomplishment in a way that diminishes and oversimplifies it. But it does that with most everything and this article did little to countervail it.

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  10. tony trolle
    Gates Horns

    I like the Watson name

    don't think Flint cuts it (lol IBM History)

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    1. Chemist
      Reply Icon

      Should have been ...

      Mycroft , who was Sherlock Holmes' smarter brother

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  11. Flybert
    Boffin

    Human muscle responce times

    once the human mind decides when it has a probable answer, it can not push a button faster than about 250ms. It is not usually possible to predict when a sentence will end, introducing further lag time .. where if they text being given Watson had a "." to denote the end of the answer-statement, there would be no lag for it to start processing the totality of the clue-statement.

    once Watson got to it's decision, I doubt the lag to push the button was but 10ms

    Watson had an unfair advantage then, and should have had an artificial lag put in to approximate the human's lag in determining when the clue was finished and the time for a hand to respond to the human brain's signal to push the button

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  12. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Thumb Up

    Impressive result. Near real time parsing of ambigious english language

    Then running it against a large database.

    But as others have pointed out keeping personal data *private* will be vital in preventing this capability from being misused.

    Note it's about working out how to *ask* the question rather than necessarily the size of the DB or its search speed.

    Thumbs up for the tech, juries out on the possible uses.

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  13. Eddy Ito

    Not a real test

    I dare it to correctly answer half of the questions posed by the missus. You know the type, "should I wear these red shoes with this dress or those vermilion ones?", "do these jeans make by butt look big?" and "do you think she is pretty?"

    Good luck with that Watson.

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  14. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge

    Link!

    http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs124/AIMagzine-DeepQA.pdf

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  15. RightPaddock
    Pirate

    Reality Imitating Art ?

    In "Satan, His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S." by Jeremy Leven

    Dr. Leo Szlyck imagines a machine with synapse-like circuits. After building the machine, he debates over whether he should turn it on, believing it could be a weapon of immense power. Against his better judgement, he does, and he's greeted by the giant machine that calls itself Satan.

    Great book

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