I don't think it was unfair to give Watson the question as text. Good Jeopardy players don't listen to Alex read the question, they read it quickly off the screen then spend the time it takes Alex to read the question thinking about their answer, which is pretty much what Watson does. Sure, Watson can "read" the text in milliseconds and it takes a human a second or two, but also keep in mind that some of the time Watson is thinking about the question is spent on natural language processing: parsing the question, identifying the meaning, etc. So it might end up evening out.
I also don't think it was unfair how buzzing was handled. The whole point of these computer vs. human match-ups are to let computers do what computers do best and humans do what humans do best and see who wins. Trying to handicap the computer to take away its distinct advantages defeats the purpose of playing a machine. But that being said, I still think Watson's ability to dominate on the buzzer is a large reason why it won. I don't understand how there can be debate on whether Watson had an advantage on the buzzer or not when he clearly got the buzz on a huge majority of the questions, and Jennings and Rutter, Rutter especially, are considered some of the fastest people on the buzzer who've ever played the game (and they're also the two best players overall, which goes to show that buzzing is as important, if not more important, than actual knowledge when it comes to playing Jeopardy). The way the buzzer works is that there's a human sitting off camera who presses a button to activate the buzzers after Trebek says the final syllable of the question. This causes some lights to turn on on the game board which tells the contestants that they can buzz in. If you buzz in early, you're locked out for 250ms. Good players like Rutter and Jennings don't wait for the lights, though, they try to anticipate it so they can get in faster. Since the person activating the buzzer is human, he's going to have some jitter in the time between Trebek finishing and the buzzers being activated. Watson, however, isn't affected by this jitter, because it is connected to the button this person is pressing to activate the buzzers. It knows exactly when the buzzers are activated. It makes sense that a machine can be better on the buzzer, it just isn't a very impressive feat to demonstrate. Basically I just don't think Jeopardy is a good format to show off a question answering machine. Much like our Go engines (I use the term "our" liberally here, as I just follow this mailing list but haven't actually developed a Go engine), Watson can keep refining its answer the more time it has to think. What IBM decided to do was just choose an amount of time, 2 seconds in this case, and that's exactly how long Watson thinks about every question. If it takes Trebek 10 seconds to read the question, Watson is just sitting there idle for 8 of them waiting to buzz (or not buzz if its not confident enough). What's interesting about this is there was one category in the second game, I think, "Actors as directors" where the question was just a name. It took Trebek less than 2 seconds to read the question, and the humans dominated this category because Watson wasn't done thinking by the time the buzzers were activated. Just an interesting thing I thought I'd mention. I want to stress that I'm not trying to say Watson isn't a ground breaking creation. It is. I just don't think the fact that Watson beat the two best human Jeopardy players is what shows this. Seeing Watson answering the questions is. The fact that it won or lost is irrelevant. Colin _______________________________________________ Computer-go mailing list [email protected] http://dvandva.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/computer-go
