Watson Conquers Jeopardy

The second night of the IBM/Jeopardy match was a rout for the Watson program. The questions in this episode were harder, and, in my view, the match was more interesting.

Watson performed admirably. As I explained in my previous essays, the real game isn't knowing facts; it's the ability to do enough natural-language understanding to figure out what the question is asking for.

Clue: An étude is a composition that... The name is French for this

Here, it has to figure out that what's being asked for is the English translation of the French word étude. Then do the translation. It got it. Bravo!

Even in its mistakes, I was impressed. And looking at mistakes that people make, too, tells you a lot. In one case, both Watson and the humans had trouble interpreting the question.…

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Also see this Wired.com interview with one of the researchers who created Watson.

Also see the New York Times and the BBC News.

The image above is furnished by the New York Times.