Outsmarting the worlds smartest computer

[fido123]

Originally Posted by Izzy

It does have close to perfect programming. It can't find the answer instantly because its searching through databases of billions and billions of things. Even with the most efficient algorithms humans can still occasionally out preform it. It just shows how amazing the human brain is at recalling a specific piece of information at will.

The way the program can retrieve, and store data is all a part of that perfection that I don't think any of us will see in our lifetime. We would have to look at how the actual brain works, which like you said, shows how amazing the brain is. Programming perfection has a LONG way to go.

[who_cares973]

I remember when watson played its first game. Started off amazingly and then just started bombing question after question

[sumzup]

I thought it was kind of unfair in one respect. Human reaction time is much slower; there were definitely some moments where Ken and Brad clearly knew the answer, but Watson was able to ring in with robotic (heh) precision every single time before any human could have ever done so. It's no surprise that Watson wins on almost all the questions it's sure about (i.e. it instantly rings in on those questions it outputs high "correctness percentages" for).

Also, thread title is retarded. First of all, beating Watson on the Final Jeopardy question does not mean you outsmarted it. Second, even applying the adjective "smartest" to a computer is fallacious. What does smartness even mean with regards to computers? Watson's certainly not the most powerful computer around, and it's software/algorithms are tailored to a very specific task. I guarantee that it would fail if you tried to retarget it (as it currently exists) towards a generic web search.

That said, this is very impressive stuff. I was at a CS department event where there were some IBM people/other researchers who showed us some of the technological underpinnings, and the algorithms are definitely very sophisticated.

Some interesting facts:

1) Watson runs on 3000 processors; when a test was done with just one processor (a typical 2.6 GHz processor you might find in your desktop), it took 2 hours to output an answer.

2) Watson wasn't programmed with any strategy at all; so you get instances where if a human contestant rings in and answers wrongly, Watson will ring in and answer with whatever answer it's most confident about, even if it's the same wrong answer. Of course, it can't really interact with/process that information, so it kind of makes sense.

3) Several factors are weighted and analyzed in the process of answering a question, and hard limits don't really exist. This is why Watson ended up choosing Toronto for Final Jeopardy, even though the category was U.S. Cities. The subroutines it followed ended up just deprioritizing that information a little in favor of the other clues, which presumablypointed to Toronto somehow.

4) IBM is keeping secret the exact sources of information they used to build the databases Watson relies on. Wonder what's so special about it that they want to keep it under wraps...

Originally Posted by fido123

The way the program can retrieve, and store data is all a part of that perfection that I don't think any of us will see in our lifetime. We would have to look at how the actual brain works, which like you said, shows how amazing the brain is. Programming perfection has a LONG way to go.

Agreed, although it's not like the brain is perfectly programmed, either. The brain works well at the tasks it has adapted to be able to do, but that doesn't mean it's perfect...it's not like it was intelligently designed. >_>

[Reincarnate]

Before each game they run Watson through countless trivia tests -- the more it gets wrong, the more it learns and becomes better at identifying an answer given the framework it uses for peeling apart inquiries. It's a glorified genetic algo.

It's really impressive to see it in action -- awesome stuff.

[fido123]

Never said it was, but it's better than anything we have now and could learn probably learn a lot from learning how the brain works at a "hardware" and "software" level.

On another note I don't know anything about biology, but wouldn't a brain also have the equivalent to a file-system? Does it store values how CMOS? Are those values binary, or do different voltages/amperages of electricity translate into other values? I often wonder how similar a computer and a brain are.

[Reincarnate]

Well, check out the Blue Brain Project, fido, if you want to look into that more.

Our brain is very similar to a computer but they run on different underlying properties and the brain is insanely more complex. It's a huge mapped network of brain cells with billions upon billions of connections, and different permutations of these firings result in different interpretations of stimuli and decision-making.

[Duplica]

only thing this machine doesn't have is common sense, which was its downfall obviously.

[Wineandbread]

What is Toronto?????
owned... but not really lol xd

Allowing a computer to interpret the language that they use in Jeopardy is really an amazing feat. It didn't get everything right but it didn't really miss very many.

[reuben_tate]

Programming is all based upon processes. For a computer to be able to teach itself, it would need to be able to create it's own processes, or in other words, be able to teach itself. As of right now, that technology is a still far way off, and to be able to program a process capable of creating it's own processes would be a very challenging for any group of programmers. Plus, if it was a computer or robot that could teach itself to do things, that would put the programmers' job at risk. If the robot can teach itself how to do things, society wouldn't need programmers to write these new processes for these self-teaching robots. Just wanted to throw in my two cents since people have the misconception that robots can just teach themselves how to do things based on the robots "observations."

[Izzy]

Well yea, there is no such thing as true artificial intelligence yet. Would be exciting though..

[fido123]

I'm not sure if you firmly grasp how computers work reuben. What you're talking about is a subprocess, which is a very old programming technique used in pretty much everything. Other processes can also create it's own full process but it's really only a difference of organization/reliability. If you open a bunch of tabs on the web browser Chrome and check processes currently running you'll see a chrome.exe for every tab open.

The real reason why this super-computer isn't as good as a human brain is mainly because the software to already produce these results is extremely complex and many many hours. To make more code it would take more man hours, more money, more detail (adds to complexity), and every employee would probably have a pretty high pay-check for being extremely skilled programmers, maybe some medical professionals to help the programmers understand how the human brain interprets language.

[Izzy]

I don't really think rueben was using the right word, but I think he just means that a program can't write new code to make new functions for itself. How can a program know what new functions it would need? That is the real problem with AI.

[reuben_tate]

Originally Posted by Izzy

I don't really think rueben was using the right word, but I think he just means that a program can't write new code to make new functions for itself. How can a program know what new functions it would need? That is the real problem with AI.

Thanks Izzy for interpreting my post. A computer or robot does not have the ability to write it's own code based off of the computer's/robot's stimuli.

[MrGiggles]

ten bucks says it just googles the question, appends site:wikipedia.com, and responds with the title of the top result

[Mans0n]

means you must be one really smart person ;O

[Ninty64]

Originally Posted by MrGiggles

ten bucks says it just googles the question, appends site:wikipedia.com, and responds with the title of the top result

They said it doesn't have access to the internet, so no google. That would be "cheating" if it could access the internet while playing jeopardy.

But they did download the WHOLE Wikipedia and a lotta other crap to it. Since it has 15 Terrabytes of RAM, you can just imagine how much harddrive it must have. Although, maybe they use something similar to google to search through it all.

[reuben_tate]

Originally Posted by Ninty64

They said it doesn't have access to the internet, so no google. That would be "cheating" if it could access the internet while playing jeopardy.

But they did download the WHOLE Wikipedia and a lotta other crap to it. Since it has 15 Terrabytes of RAM, you can just imagine how much harddrive it must have. Although, maybe they use something similar to google to search through it all.

I bet it has some sophisticated searching algorithm.

[Izzy]

It probably has only about 15 terabytes of HD space as well. If I was creating this machine then I would have it load its entire database of information into ram on startup. This way you never have to go to the harddrive to lookup information which is around 100x-1000x slower then getting something from ram.
There are some distro's of linux that can be loaded entirely onto ram when you boot your computer. Makes for a very fast OS.

[Duplica]

When Watson wins at price is right, THAT'll be impressive

[ninjaKIWI]

Originally Posted by Izzy

It probably has only about 15 terabytes of HD space as well. If I was creating this machine then I would have it load its entire database of information into ram on startup. This way you never have to go to the harddrive to lookup information which is around 100x-1000x slower then getting something from ram.
There are some distro's of linux that can be loaded entirely onto ram when you boot your computer. Makes for a very fast OS.

Originally Posted by ninjaKIWI

It has 15TB of RAM, but the information it searches through is actually under 1TB.

It's not a very large database in terms of 'size'. Remember, it's all text. It indexes the entire database multiple times in its RAM.