Watson = the ultimate bot?

[Kurn]

The impression I got was how the human mind is still far superior.

See, as impressive as Watson was, it was simply brute force. 100 State of the art high speed servers rigged in sequence. A bludgeon of a search engine.

Example: The Final Jeopardy! clue in the first game:

category: US Cities
answer: Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle

Easy clue for a human. We can discard irrelevancies here. Since a "2nd largest airport" is mentioned, we automatically KNOW we're looking at maybe the 5 largest cities. We identify the key to the clue as a WWII BATTLE and almost immediately come up with Chicago-Midway. It is irrelevant to our decision making whether or not we have ever heard of a war hero named "O'Hare". We, as humans, write down "What is Chicago" with complete confidence.

Watson, who KNOWS NOTHING, begins by parsing the names of airports in comparison to names of WWII medal winners, since the machine can't eliminate that part of the clue as meaningless since it is not intelligent. This initial search is a huge undertaking even for this mega Google on steroids, and it runs out of time, and probably because it has found a war hero named "Pearson", it answers "What is Toronto"

The humans here easily dominate the machine when the task actually involves intelligent decision-making.

SECOND POINT: Watson dominates because from the point of answer confidence to ring in, the humans have about a 0.3 second latency. The brain must signal the thumb to move and the thumb must push the button. Watson simply send a speed-of-light impulse to ring in. Even if the human gets to the answer 0.2 seconds before Watson, he can't ring in fast enough. watch the looks on Jennings' and Rutters' faces. They can't ring in fast enough. Build that same latency into Watson's ring-in function and the game is much closer. The humans may even win.

Watson was impressive and cool to watch, but is it in Jenning's words "Our new overlord", a CYbernetic Life fOrm Node?

Not even close.

[omahilo]

yeah that first final was pretty funny since he did not name a U.S. City. Also like you said, its all about how fast u can ring in. 95% of the time on any given jeopardy question, all 3 players know the answer, its just a matter of who rings in first. You could tell that Jennings was getting pretty pissed about not ringing in fast enough lol.