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Old 02-18-2011, 12:52 PM   #325
DaddyTorgo
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Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: Massachusetts
Or this gem:

Quote:


Q.
It was interesting to me that the "Which decade" category seemed especially hard for Watson. Why was that?



A.
Ken Jennings :
I think it took it a little while to figure out that the answers would all be decades. This seems incredible to a human playing along at home, but basic contextual issues like this are incredibly hard for machine intelligence to master. The cool thing about Watson is it learns from those mistakes. By the end of the category, it had learned that the answers were going to be decades, and adjusted accordingly.

It is clearly the modern descendent of "Joshua," the learning computer in the 1980s movie WarGames. "How about a nice game of Jeopardy, Ken?" "No, let's play Global Thermonuclear War."
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