IBM "Watson" Demonstration on Jeopardy is a Fraud

There will be no link. I saw this in real time. Tonight on Jeopardy the final question category was "U.S. Cities". Both human contestants got the answer Chicago correctly. The IBM computer answered "Toronto?????????" This answer and no challenge by Trabek? No grumbling in the audience? Likely the audience was filled with IBM employees. Just a few chuckles. Things that make you go...... WTF?

This had to be a programmed "miss". Why? You tell me. Trying to make it seem fallible? So as not to seem so sinister? This thing has a level of computation and control over vast systems and corporations never before seen. Hundreds of thousands more jobs will be lost when computers of this level enter the corporate market place. Not very appetizing an advertisement in the current job market. Just my opinion.

"Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see."

reply to post by Hemisphere


dude you saw tonights show already??

SPOILER ALERT....

damn me and my clicking on your post.....

i was hoping to see it tonight Pacific coast time....

reply to post by Hemisphere


I don't have TV and since you spoiled it for those on the west coast. What was the question?

Paraphrasing:

What US City's major airport is named after a WWII hero. Its second largest airport is named after a WWII battle.

First of all, Toronto is not in the US, last I checked.

Originally posted by darrman
reply to post by Hemisphere

 

dude you saw tonights show already??

SPOILER ALERT....

damn me and my clicking on your post.....

i was hoping to see it tonight Pacific coast time....

edit on 2/15/11 by darrman because: no flag for you!!! LOL ok,,, i will star yahh

Don't be turned off. You'll want to watch to see this yourself.

Originally posted by Gamma MO
Paraphrasing:

What US City's major airport is named after a WWII hero. Its second largest airport is named after a WWII battle.

First of all, Toronto is not in the US, last I checked.

Thanks Gamma! That's the basic question.

The first thing a computer or a human will do is eliminate all wrong answers. Knowing the category, "U.S. Cities", you or a programmed computer of this nature, immediately eliminate all known wrong answers as Toronto is. A human will do this subconsiously.

That's what you do knowing the category alone. The next thing you would do is start to list in your mind U.S. cities in preparation for the question. How could "Watson" give such a blatantly wrong answer? It was programmed to miss this question. It lied! Did they do this on purpose? I think so. There is something sinister in this.

reply to post by Hemisphere


I thought that was rather strange as well. Also did I miss an explanation on how this answer was recieved?
Very interesting macine however. I enjoyed watching it. Seems impossible. Then even some of the creators surprised by answers and not being able to predict responses confused me. Definetly be looking into this for awhile.

SPOILER ALERT: watson loses to the humans in the final round. the category was emotions. the answer to the final jeopardy question was: what is love.

watson apparently couldn't comprehend this basic emotion and self-destructed on set.

sparks and flying electrical wires caused the evacuation of the studio audience and damage to the set was estimated to be $750,000. reports say alex trebek is still shaken up and had to be sedated.

ibm is also in the process of suing nbc studios, alex trebek and merv griffin productions for $570 million claiming that the final question was rigged and the producers knew that watson's cpu could not process such complex and abstract notions such as love.

nbc couldn't be reached for comment.

There was a fascinating episode of NOVA dedicated to "Watson." It was very interesting, and Watson missed a good deal of the time. In fact, there was some doubt whether the Jeopardy producers were going to allow Watson to be on the show. Some of the wrong answers were actually pretty amusing. Slowly, they have increased it's performance, and in the mock trials Watson has now gotten to a level equivalent to the top human competitors. The process was fascinating, I thought.

Watson is just a stupid publicity stunt like their chess-playing Deep Blue. They've been working on AI for decades, and who really cares about a computer playing Jeopardy or chess? Unless the humans win

Hope they recoup whatever money they wasted on this stunt. Frankly, I don't see the benefit of any of this.

Don't think there was any fraud involved or even a slight conspiracy. Nothing is perfect, not even a computer, since it is only as good as the people who program it. People aren't perfect so a machine cannot be perfect...Yet. Still, it's an amazing and frightening accomplishment by IBM and gives us all a glimpse into the future.

Originally posted by Feltrick
Don't think there was any fraud involved or even a slight conspiracy. Nothing is perfect, not even a computer, since it is only as good as the people who program it. People aren't perfect so a machine cannot be perfect...Yet. Still, it's an amazing and frightening accomplishment by IBM and gives us all a glimpse into the future.

I have to disagree. Basic encyclopedic knowledge would be one of the first things programmed into such a computer. This computer was answering questions on art and literature and it clams on U.S. Cities? A sixth grader wouldn't give "Toronto" as an answer. Type "US Cities" into Google and see how many times "Toronto" shows up. That's just a search engine.

reply to post by Hemisphere


True, it does have a great amount of information programmed into it, but it does have a problem in understanding the question. IBM found that to be the most difficult part of the programing. We, humans, can sometimes fail to understand a question and will get a simple question wrong. Same goes for this machine. I'm not saying it didn't have the answer, I'm saying that it didn't understand the question and failed to identify "US City" and went with CITY.

reply to post by Feltrick


Still....even if Canada and the US were combined the answer would be Chicago as the airport and WWII war hero was "O'Hare"....Toronto sounds like a native Canadian Indian name.

reply to post by CosmicCitizen


Toronto's airport is named Pearson International.

I'm wondering, if it is a fraud, could they have made it answer that way to get the idea of Ontario being a State placed into our minds? Especially with what is happening with all the border talks going on.....

reply to post by Feltrick


I am basing my contentions on how it apparently arrived at other answers in the round. Other answers it gave were far more derivative than this one.

Originally posted by CosmicCitizen
reply to post by Feltrick

 

Still....even if Canada and the US were combined the answer would be Chicago as the airport and WWII war hero was "O'Hare"....Toronto sounds like a native Canadian Indian name.

Toronto is the city -- "Billy Bishop" is the airport. It simply didn't narrow the question down well enough from the data it had.

reply to post by Feltrick


Good point,

I think the initials threw Watson off. If Trebek would have said United States, he probably would have got it right. But this is what will lead to A.I. Computers making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. I wonder if they ask Watson that question like 5 times in a row would he change his answer and figure out U.S. is United States.

Based on what I saw, Watson comes up with several answers and ranks them based on how confident the answer is. It'd be interesting to see how high Chicago ranked.

Found this link which explains how Watson derives answers.

thenumerati.net...


Hope you find it interesting.