Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Watson on Jeopardy.....

...has been very interesting to watch, with my bent towards IT things.

I too though that getting a computer (or very many computers as it is) to play Jeopardy and play Jeopardy well would have been impossible.

Its proven to be more than possible, and I'm kinda rooting for the humans.

Part of the exercise for IBM has been to see how they could make computers more like humans. Humans are very complicated they've found out.

I wonder what could be learned about dementia from the Watson project; one thing from the second program was really telling. Ken Jennings asked a question 'What was the 20's?' in response to a clue that mentioned the decade in which Oreo cookies were invented, Ken was incorrect, and then Watson rang in with the same incorrect answer, kinda like Watson has no short term memory (which it doesn't have much of!); Trebek came back with a snippy 'Ken just said that Watson'.

It was just like most of my conversations with Mom, she'll ask me a question, I'll answer it, and then Mom will either get the answer all messed up or will ask the question right back at me.

I think its wonderful that IBM has built such a large array of computers in order to play Jeopardy, I'd love to see the same level of research applied to dementia, what may the causes be, how to live with dementia better, and how we can better enrich and perhaps 're-program' our Loved Ones.


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