Well it's official, one computer, not attached to the Internet was beaten the top Jeopardy players. Of course it took some four years for a team at IBM to put it together, but then the next one will be easier and easier to assemble. In the late 90's the top chess player was beaten by big blue. Now this game of wits has been beaten. The next step will be telling since the machine will have learned "common sense", will be attached to sensors and the Internet. This should give us a tool of unimaginable capacity for SPEEDY good or evil. Steve.
Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, two of the most successful players in Jeopardy, put up a spirited fight, but ultimately couldn’t hang. Jennings foreshadowed the inevitable with his final Jeopardyanswer. The answer: Bram Stoker. The subtext: “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”
The two day totals highlighted the extent of the victory for Watson.
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- We're totally surprised, in a larger theoretical sense, that a computer could win at Jeopardy.
- We're totally not surprised that Watson, the system built by IBM over the past few years at the expense of millions of dollars, actually succeeded at winning at Jeopardy.
- Computers have better reflexes than humans, as it turns out.
- Deal with it.
There were only two situations where the human players showed signs of superiority. The first came in the early questions of day three where Jennings and Rutter appeared to conclude that a round about movies was straightforward enough that it was safe to buzz in immediately and then use the few seconds before their required response to figure out the puzzle. That proved just enough to outdo Watson, which was programmed to (albeit it at a rapid pace) both figure out the answer and decide whether it was worth buzzing in. Source: Watson Wins!01000011 01101111 01101110 01100111 01110010 01100001 01110100 01110011 00100001TRANSLATOR, BINARY