Baumblog EST 1968 - A blog for the Baumbachs who originated in Syracuse, NY


	Posts tagged with "television"

Man vs. Machine...again
posted by Marc on February 14, 2011 @ 10:38AM

IBM proved they could beat a chess champion, but they're at it again (read: They spent my bonus on another toy!)

Starting tonight, and for the two following nights, IBM is pitting their supercomputer, Watson, against the two greatest Jeopardy! champions. Will machine prevail, or will it blue screen of death? Either way, it should be entertaining. For more information and some videos of Watson in action, check out the Jeopardy! website.

Predictions?

14 comments | Tags: computers, television

Geoff said about 8 hours later

My bet is on Watson. Seeing as they specifically designed it for Jeopardy...though I agree, I wish they spent their money on a machine that could balance our budget or something actually useful. I'm sure they've learned a few useful things from this process though. Interesting to say the least.
Geoff said about 8 hours later

Just caught the last 15 minutes of the first episode tonight. While Watson had a quirk with repeating the same wrong answer as the first contestant, I gotta say it's pretty cool to see a machine up there answering questions like a regular person. I don't think machine takeover is coming anytime soon, but I think I'd like a Watson upgrade sometime. Cyborg here we come!
Geoff said 1 day later

Watson wins...big
Marc said 1 day later

Yea, I don't suspect the humans will recover from that loss. Even if one of them gets on a huge winning streak, Watson isn't gonna stop playing well.

To me it seemed like the humans had a tough time beating Watson to the buzzer and I'm still not convinced that whatever they rigged up to make that portion more fair, was not fair enough. Ken Jennings seemed to be pretty upset every question cause he couldn't beat Watson on the buzzer. It seemed like the only way they beat him was if Watson decided to not buzz in for that question.

I did like Watson's one response: "What is leg?" That's gonna be my go-to answer during any game where I don't know the answer. :)
Geoff said 2 days later

hahaha. Yeah the reflex thing is a tough thing to overcome when competing against machines. They don't have a finger to press the trigger button. Not sure how that whole parts works to be honest...I assume you can't ring in until Alex finishes the question? Does seem unfair if the machine is sent a signal to indicate it can answer a question...even if they do put some form of random delay to compensate...dunno. In any case, chock one up for the mean machine team.
Marc said 2 days later

According to IBM and Jeopardy, there's no advantage: http://ibmresearchnews.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-watson-sees-hears-and-speaks-to.html

Interestingly enough, Ken Jennings disagrees and even said so on Twitter today: http://twitter.com/#!/KenJennings/status/37504762047897601

"@PatKiernan IBM says: no buzzer advantage for the computer. In practice, the humans tend to disagree."
GJ said 2 days later

I watched. Wasn't too impressed. The "answers" Watson was coming up with looked one heck of a lot like what I would have gotten with a GIS. I'm betting this is simply a highly optimized search tool that specializes in the type of trivia seen in Jeopardy.

Meh, I think I respect Deep Blue a whole lot more after this. :)
Geoff said 4 days later

I disagree...these aren't simple questions that are asked. They use slang, metaphors, etc. Though, it is a bit ridiculous that it required an entire building to ascertain the answer...though nothing out of the ordinary since our first computers were the size of buildings practically. In due time this will be seen as a stepping stone to intelligent computer systems. I imagine the Curator from the Movie "The Time Machine"
GJ said 4 days later

You disagree with what, exactly?
Steve said 8 days later

Sorry, a bit late on this, but as avid Jeopardy watchers, Parsla and I caught both episodes. The first show, Watson blew the guys away. The second show, I have to believe, something was changed, as Ken was able to buzz in a LOT more, and Watson seemed to get a lot more questions wrong. I'm betting two things - after the first show, a change was made to Watson's response time, allowing the humans more time to ring in. Second, I bet the people writing the answers for the show made saw how the computer worked the first time, and rewrote the answers to make it harder for the computer to get the questions right.

They did talk about a potential use in the medical industry to help diagnose diseases, but based on the performance the second night, it seems like it could easily be screwed up by human input.
Marc said 8 days later

Obviously we can't know for sure, but one of the reasons Watson faltered a bit more on the second game was that some of the answers were a lot shorter, which left Watson little to work with and, more importantly, less time to figure out what the correct response is. That short period of time gave Ken more time to buzz in. You also probably noticed Watson just wasn't as sure about the answers this time around, so in some cases it didn't even buzz in since it never hit the confidence threshold.

According to everybody involved (Jeopardy, IBM, and the humans), the answers were actually taken from their normal database of potentials. They only removed video and audio clues since Watson was deaf and blind, and even dumb at times!

I definitely think that it unfortunately came down to a buzzer game which Ken even said that most Jeopardy games do. Obviously the computer has a major advantage here and no matter how you cut it, there's not a decent solution to this problem.

I do think there's some decent technology behind this, but I'm with GJ, Deep Blue was much more impressive computer feat at the time. I think this technology could easily be used to replace a lot of customer support lines if combined with decent voice recognition software.
Steve said 8 days later

Wait, Watson was deaf? So he was fed the answers electronically? That's no fair. We know computers can read text way faster than humans. No wonder he always beat the humans to the buzzer, he knew the question before the Alex had even finished reading the answer.
Marc said 8 days later

Watson was fed the answers via a direct connection in plain text at the same time it would become visible to the humans retina. Which on the surface seems unfair, but in reality this may actually be pretty fair.

Most humans playing Jeopardy quickly scan the text looking for keywords and decide whether their confidence is pretty high they'll know the answer. Then they prepare to buzz in and take the 5 seconds after buzzing (and any other extra time they may have after scanning) to figure out the answer.

Since Watson is a ridiculous computer, his time to process is often much faster than a human, however he doesn't have that ability to intuitively know what words may be important just by looking at its structure. This is the part of Jeopardy that determines if your a champion vs. a chump. Watson on the other hand has to try to take the whole answer and make some sense of it. Most humans probably can scan, pick a couple words and be pretty confident of an answer.

I would expect a v2.0 version of Watson to act more like a typical contestant, but I don't think this gave him a big advantage if any, and certainly nothing compared to the advantage he had on the buzzer.
Geoff said 9 days later

well I guess I'm alone in being impressed. Maybe it was the cool brain animation, or maybe deep down, I really envy the machines. I thought it was pretty freaking cool to see the machine up there competing. This will surely make it to the "Mechanica Bible" 300 years from now and will server as inspiration to all machinelings.

Did you catch the Emmys last night?
posted by GJ on September 21, 2009 @ 7:48AM

Neil Patrick Harris (ok, ok, he'll *always* be Doogie Howser to this old dude) hosted the Emmys last night. If you watched most of it, you may have caught his alter ego Dr. Horrible take over the airwaves, only to be thwarted by Captain Hammer.

Who are these characters, you may be asking? Or not, if you're a plugged in Joss Whedon fan, since Dr. Horrible is a production of his. You should check out Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog when you have a free 45 minutes--it's quite the amusing romp.

Now, Dr. Horrible isn't the only great web television going these days, oh no. One of the stars of Dr. Horrible is Felicia Day, who has her own web series, The Guild. It's a hilarious diary of a World of Warcraft kind of playing group, known as a guild. They're into Season 3 now, but I would recommend watching Seasons 1 and 2 in order before diving into Season 3. Each webisode is about five minutes long, and maybe 10-12 per season.

4 comments | Tags: television

IBM vs. Jeopardy!
posted by Marc on April 27, 2009 @ 10:27AM

Remember when IBM's Deep Blue super computer took on chess champion Garry Kasparov and actually won? Well IBM Research is at it again, only this time the challenge is beyond ridiculous. Meet Watson:

4 comments | Tags: technology, television

Goodbye, BSG!
posted by GJ on March 21, 2009 @ 6:30AM

I don't watch much on TV, and now I'll be watching even less now that Battlestar Galactica has ended its long run on SciFi (don't get me started on Bonnie Hammer's "SyFy" rebranding). Anyhow, for those of you who know nothing of BSG, or just think of the late 70s goofy series, this was actually far darker but the writing was much better. It definitely hit doldrums in the middle of its run (what series doesn't?) but the past two seasons really upped the ante and came ot a final conclusion last night.

Few other shows spawned in the shadow of 9/11 dared to invoke the spectres of terrorism and denial of the freedom of speech, and just the whole concept of not every really knowing who the real enemy was most of the time.

I'm not going to spoil it for those who haven't yet seen it, or aren't familiar with it. If you've never seen it, you might want to give it a try--you might be surprised, even if you're not much into science fiction.

Guess I'll go back to just watching hockey and big bang theory. :)

No comments | Tags: television

Coming August 27 to the Discovery Channel
posted by GJ on August 7, 2008 @ 1:11PM

7 comments | Tags: myths, video, space, science, television

Marc said 2 minutes later

Wow, I am so glad I have DVR. I just got a new episode of MythBusters last night and I know this would be one I'd miss. The answer is clear, but I'm glad MythBusters is going to clarify it for the non-geeks.
GJ said 43 minutes later

The show is awesome, period. No other show EVER has gotten so many people plugged in to what science and research really is. One can only hope it gets more people thinking critically, unlike that scary lady who thinks metallic oxide salts oozing from the ground are causing rainbows to appear in lawn sprinklers.

I only wish I was kidding about that.
GJ said about 1 hour later

For those of you who wanted to see the stupidity I referred to above, check here.
Geoff said about 1 hour later

That sprinkler lady can't be real. That is the real hoax here..forget the moon. If there is any remote truth to that sprinkler video, that lady should be quartered.
GJ said about 20 hours later

Go look up dbootsthediva's channel on youtube, or go just look up dboots on google. She's been drinking the kool-aid for some years now--she's paranoid about HAARP and blames everything on it, even if she doesn't have a clue what she's analyzing. She's also been trolling physics discussion sites since at least 2006. It's not a hoax--she's a true-believer.

If you want to know what HAARP is, start here.
Steve said about 22 hours later

How can shadows go in two different directions? Easy. Two light sources. You think they forgot to bring lights with them on the spaceship, or on their cameras?

How does the flag "wave?" Well, in minimal gravity, it's going to keep moving when it's forced to move. By moving the flagpole around, the flag is going to be forced to wave. Do you think the astronauts would want a picture of a flag just sitting limp? Heck no, so I'm sure they manually made the wave flap a little bit. In the little bit of gravity up there, it probably could continue to flap for a while once it's manually started.

And who says there is no wind up there anyway? No wind at all? Nothing? Not even the slightest? In 1/8th the gravity of earth (IIRC), it wouldn't take much wind to make the flag flap.

Is it that hard to believe that we landed on the moon? Don't you think if it was truly a hoax, the Soviets would have called us out on it?
GJ said about 22 hours later

Multiple light sources is why they claim it was done in a movie studio.

There is no wind on the moon, as there is no atmosphere. Not in the slightest.

It's not hard at all to believe we landed on the moon. Simply, it'd be far beyond our capability to pull off a ruse involving so many people. You'll find a lot of people who ignore this basic fact and do the following:

1. Find some "evidence" that appears to show an element of a claim is incorrect (or, in their interpretation, created to deceive the masses).
2. Declare the entire claim to be not only false, but a sham to (again) deceive the masses.
3. Make up reasons for why the Man is out get us.

Moon hoaxes do this; 9/11 truthers do this; pretty much any conspiracy theorist uses this method. And these are not a few kooks among us--a great many people believe that moon landings were faked. That's frightening--especially when so much of modern communications technology that we use every day was directly contributed to by the space program.

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