Confessions of a Nerd

Subtitled: Finding answers for my dad and I about Watson, the Super Computer

Last week I asked my parents to DVR this weeks episodes of Jeopardy for me.  Wow.  Does that scream nerd or what?

The day before I asked them, I found myself stuck with an de-programmed remote control and therefore was stuck watching PBS, the channel that had been previously viewed that morning.  I was pretty grumpy about it but soon found myself ignoring the book I was reading and watching a documentary on the intelligence of animals.  Feeling prideful, I refused to put my book down, not wanting to admit to even myself that I could enjoy PBS more than whatever prime-time shows were on.  After learning about dolphins and the parrot named Alex, who had the intelligence of a 5 year-old when he died, a show called The Smartest Machine on Earth came on and I hate to admit it, but I put my book down and called Jason to tell him to hurry home and watch it with me. 

Jason has taken a few computer programming classes and so I was .001% familiar with a few of the terms they were throwing around.  Nonetheless, I was intrigued and fascinated at what it took to build the machine that played on Jeopardy this week.  The Smartest Machine on Earth.  I watched the final episode with my dad last night, and my only regret was being so in to it that I didn't realize Carson had flooded my parents bathroom.  Sorry, Mom.  I was in full geek mode at the time.  My apologies again.

My dad and I had a few questions during the episode and I tried to explain to him what I had learned during the documentary.  I didn't come close to making any sense at all.  But hey, I was super excited when I found this article today written by Ken Jennings.  It answered a few of our questions so I thought I'd post it here for my dad.  Cause he religiously reads my blog. 

 Excerpt from this article:

"The IBM team had every reason to be hopeful. Watson seems to represent a giant leap forward in the field of natural-language processing—the ability to understand and respond to everyday English, the way Ask Jeeves did (with uneven results) in the dot-com boom. Jeopardy! clues cover an open domain of human knowledge—every subject imaginable—and are full of booby traps for computers: puns, slang, wordplay, oblique allusions. But in just a few years, Watson has learned—yes, it learns—to deal with some of the myriad complexities of English. When it sees the word "Blondie," it's very good at figuring out whether Jeopardy! means the cookie, the comic strip, or the new-wave band.

I expected Watson's bag of cognitive tricks to be fairly shallow, but I felt an uneasy sense of familiarity as its programmers briefed us before the big match:  The computer's techniques for unraveling Jeopardy! clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson's case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words.  It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it feels "sure" enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy! player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing.....

Jeopardy! devotees know that buzzer skill is crucial—games between humans are more often won by the fastest thumb than the fastest brain. This advantage is only magnified when one of the "thumbs" is an electromagnetic solenoid triggered by a microsecond-precise jolt of current. I knew it would take some lucky breaks to keep up with the computer, since it couldn't be beaten on speed."


Ahhh.  So interesting to me.  I am such a nerd and I recommend watching the documentary to anyone else who's willing to embrace their inner-nerd.