Last night was sort of hard to watch, right? Watson mopped the floor with the humans and went out to a $20,000 lead. Last night Watson got both Daily Doubles and eventually played in Final Jeopardy. The main question I want to ask is:
How does Watson decide what to wager?
Presumably it's an algorithm based on a simple (quick) examination of Watson's stores of info on any given category, crossed somehow with the game's current scores and score gaps, etc... Does Watson (actively) take into account the remaining board squares' monetary values when deciding what to wager? Does Watson learn about playing styles as the game goes on? In other words, does Watson know he's winning and is likely to continue to win, or only that he's currently ahead in points?
What jumps out to me most about last night was the final Jeopardy clue. The category was US Cities, and the clue had to do with airport names. Paraphrase is "what US city's largest airport is named for a WWII hero and second largest named for a WWII battle?" Ken, Brad, and I came up with the correct answer as 'Chicago' (references to airports O'Hare and Midway) but Watson flubbed it pretty big with "Toronto".
For starters, Toronto's not in the United States....so it seems genuinely strange to me that Watson could try to pass that one off as correct, even as a shaky guess. Secondly, Watson only wagered $947 bucks on the clue. One obvious explanation of that could be that Watson was way way ahead in the score, so oftentimes players in that position won't jeopardize (ha!) the guaranteed win in a gambit to accumulate money...however those helping normal human contestants give them a series of scenarios (at least, this is my understanding as a viewer) to help them decide how much to wager.
Watson was almost $20,000 dollars ahead, so he could have bet almost 20 times as much and still ensured his overall win in this round. Watson did no such thing, at least in part because the two day game is cumulative and so he must have it in his programming to generate as much money as possible...
This is all a roundabout way to get back to what made the category "US cities" appear daunting to Watson, and why he guessed incorrectly on a clue that at least three humans got easily. Why be intimidated by this category, and then furthermore why get it so wrong? It seems a cursory cross reference of major US airport names with WWII associated people would have quickly yielded the Chicago answer. Also note that Toronto's largest airport (YYZ, the one Rush wrote the song about) is called Lester Pearson Airport after a Canadian prime minister.
More questions than answers...looking forward to the conclusion.
"too clever is stupid, dude."
- Icepick (from Skate or Die II)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A quick search reveals that there are atleast 3 U.S. Cities with the name Toronto. Now composing all the information about these 3 cities and their airport may reveal some information about WWII.
ReplyDeleteGood point, I guess...but none of those Torontos are big enough to have two airports. 'm no kind of authority...below find the IBM blog where they attempt to explain this mistake.
ReplyDeletehttp://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2011/02/watson-on-jeopardy-day-two-the-confusion-over-an-airport-clue.html