Indisputable is the empirical evidence available guaranteeing that all 3 would have scored in the negative, thus excluded from final Jeopardy, when it came to making eye contact with/talking to an attractive woman.

P.S. If that was a “light-hearted article” and not just a massive pile of unfacts, then Keany better quit journalism.

Did this post get picked up on some kind of robot-advocacy-organization mailing list? I just hope these defenses of Watson aren’t coming from Web bots trying to protect one of their own…

The whole point of this Jeopardy match was to expose a whole new computing paradigm. Rather than just a “thinking” machine, IBM demonstrated a “comprehending” machine. I wouldn’t be surprised if the human constants were asked to let Watson win. After all, this was really a dog and pony show to unveil what could potentially be a world changing technology.

First of all, if Jeopardy! is indeed an advocate for “a diverse contestant base”, then Watson fits the bill quite well. He is the first computer to have the cognitive power and sophistication to compete against what many would believe to be some of the world’s most intelligent people, which makes him the only one of his kind. Watson is the best depiction of minority Jeopardy! might ever see (unless they decide to have Lonesome George on the show– which I find highly unlikely). Moreover, while Watson may look different from what people consider “normal” for the show, he brings way more to the table. He’s intelligent, he can only act politely, and he’s an excellent means to boost the show’s viewer rating. You even said it yourself: this was the first time you’ve watched Jeopardy! in years, even after being humiliated by it. Imagine how many other people tuned in.

Second, you don’t have to be on the show, or even on the set of the show, to practice for it and prepare accordingly. Ken and Brad could have just as easily spent as many hours preparing as Watson did–studying the show’s trends, practicing with friends, working on their ability to focus or their button-pressing technique, etc– and they could have just as easily fixed their mistakes and made themselves more capable of winning. But lo and behold, they failed to put in enough effort, and Watson took advantage of it. Don’t be so quick to assume computers are smarter than human beings because they can do math more quickly than you can and what-not. Computers are extremely, extremely primitive, even in our current technological age, and Watson is no exception. Even in spite of Watson’s ~85% win rating, Watson was truly the underdog here, not Ken or Brad.

Whether Watson was trained to be excellent at playing Jeopardy! or not, the fact of the matter is he was better than Ken or Brad because more effort was put into Watson’s training than Ken or Brad put in theirs, not that it even matters: the whole purpose of the show had nothing to do with showing off, it was more of a stepping stone for what’s to come (much like the technological expansion after Deep Blue in 1997). You make it sound like the kid who works hard for what he wants and gets it is a poor example of success. Your opinion on this event is so unbecoming of DISCOVER magazine that I find it hard to believe people will actually read this article and take it seriously. Honestly, if we as a species ever have to “welcome our new robot overlords”, it will be because people like you neglected them and were too bigoted to accept a reality where robots could be treated like human beings.

Maybe some of us humans could learn a thing or two about human language from Watson, eh?

The researchers also acknowledged that the machine had benefited from the “buzzer factor.”

Both Mr. Jennings and Mr. Rutter are accomplished at anticipating the light that signals it is possible to “buzz in,” and can sometimes get in with virtually zero lag time. The danger is to buzz too early, in which case the contestant is penalized and “locked out” for roughly a quarter of a second.

Watson, on the other hand, does not anticipate the light, but has a weighted scheme that allows it, when it is highly confident, to buzz in as quickly as 10 milliseconds, making it very hard for humans to beat. When it was less confident, it buzzed more slowly. In the second round, Watson beat the others to the buzzer in 24 out of 30 Double Jeopardy questions.

If they wanted Watson to be unfair, they could have plugged his buzzing mechanism STRAIGHT into his computer, and bypassed the buzzer all together, for instant buzzing in.
They’ve made it as fair as possible, even tho the point here was to show off how well their language processing system could figure out Jeopardy riddles, on par with or better than humans.

I can’t believe how much some people miss the point of this.

Winning Jeopardy! was a goal, of course, but it wasn’t necessarily the point. By creating a computer ‘intelligence’ that can comprehend human language (including idioms, rhymes, and other associative and somewhat loosely-defined language), we’ve opened the door to any number of technological advancements for human-computer interaction. The game was simply a means to an end.

The article Miss Keany has written here smacks of resentfulness or spite–or something far worse: fear of a computer.

I could be misinterpreting her tone, though.

She also blindly makes the “buzzer” claim.. -_-
Just because he’s a computer, people assume his buzzer is instant.
She said: “Watson had a “hand” specifically designed for high buzzer performance; how could he not win?”
That statement shows me that she obviously hasn’t researched enough to know that his buzzer has a DELAY on it, that’s MATCHED to the other human jeopardy players’ reaction times.
His buzzer is NOT designed for high performance speed, it’s designed to DELAY him, and be as fair as possible.

Useless article, ignorant opinion. Fairness isn’t even the point of these games.