Saturday, February 19, 2011

Bug lets humans grab Daily Double as Watson triumphs on Jeopardy

Note: In this article, Jeopardy's "answers" are referred to as "questions" and vice versa.

The humans tried to hold on in the second game of Jeopardy against the IBM computer, but ultimately were no match. Watson finished with a two-game total of $77,147 to Ken Jennings' $24,000 and Brad Rutter's $21,400. Jennings and Rutter managed to make a larger dent in Watson's progress in the second game, but the computer managed to take both Daily Doubles away from the human contestants, not affording them enough of an opportunity to make up for Watson's $25,000 lead from the first game. Still, there were a few aspects of the game that gave the humans some ins, including a bug that let Ken Jennings score the first Daily Double.

During a panel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Dr Chris Welty, a member of Watson's algorithms team, noted that the start-and-stop nature of filming the episode got Watson mixed up and allowed a bug to surface. Watson begins every round looking for Daily Double clues, because they are crucial to progress in the game. After one filming pause in the first round when Watson had been made to stop and then pick up again, Welty said Watson began again thinking the Daily Double had already been found. So it stopped looking for the clue, allowing Jennings to find it first.

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