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Re: [ontolog-forum] IBM Watson & source code

To: doug@xxxxxxxxxx, "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: Phil Murray <pcmurray2000@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:07:10 -0500
Message-id: <4D5BCBFE.2020109@xxxxxxxxx>
All of that is reasonable, Doug, but I think most Americans *start* 
answering that question by asking themselves, "What are the big cities 
in the US that have two major airports?"    (01)

It's pretty easy from there.    (02)

Ron Wheeler joked earlier in this exchange of posts: "There are days 
when I seem to have all the answers but the questions are wrong. :-)"    (03)

Ron wasn't just being self-deprecating. He was spot on.    (04)

      Phil    (05)

doug foxvog wrote:
> On Tue, February 15, 2011 20:55, Pavithra said:
>    
>> I read that Watson is not connected to the internet.   All the knowledge
>> is stored within its own memory like human competitors  that are not
>> connected to the internet..   Too bad Watson could not do any Google
>> search..  and get better answers..
>>      
> This was not the problem.
>
> Watson has Wikipedia in its memory.  The answers to the specified
> question are in Wikipedia:  Toronto being a Canadian city, Chicago
> being a US city, Chicago having O'Hare and Midway as airports,
> O'Hare being named after a WW II hero (flying ace), Midway being the
> name of a WW II battle.
>
> I assume that disjointness between cities of two different countries
> would be in Watson's knowledge base.  I would guess that Watson would
> only count as US cities those that were positively identified as such.
>
> The lack of information was not Watson's problem on this matter.
>
> I note that a number of US states have cities or towns named "Toronto":
> IL, IN, IO, KS, MO, OH, SD.  But Toronto, IL, is near Springfield, not
> near Chicago.  This was not a matter of choosing the name of a Chicago
> suburb which is near the two referred to airports.
>
> The problem posed was complex.  The humans could decode it as:
> * Find a US city
> * that has at least 3 airports (since "second largest airport")
> * The larger of these airports is named after a WW II hero
> * The smaller has the name of a WW II battle.
>
> The human would assume that the airports mentioned are commercial ones.
> The human would assume that the city would be the primary city (or
> possibly secondary city for two nearby cities) for the airport.
> This greatly limits the cities.
>
> Watson would probably look for WW II heroes and battles and compare their
> names to airports'.  If it searched through Wikipedia's list of a few
> hundred WW II battles and checked the names against airport names it would
> have found that "Midway" matched.  If it then searched for the names of
> other Chicago airports and determining if someone with such a name could
> be considered a WW II hero.
>
> But my understanding is that Watson would do the searches in parallel.
>
> -- doug foxvog
>
>    
>> --- On Tue, 2/15/11, doug  foxvog<doug@xxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:
>>
>> From: doug  foxvog<doug@xxxxxxxxxx>
>> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] IBM Watson&  source code
>> To: "[ontolog-forum]"<ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>> Date: Tuesday, February 15, 2011, 8:47 PM
>>
>> On Tue, February 15, 2011 16:24, John Sowa said:
>>      
>>> ...
>>>        
>>      
>>> But the most common mistake that Watson makes is elementary
>>> category errors.
>>>        
>> On Day 2, it also was making category answers.
>>
>> In Final Jeopardy the category was "U.S. Cities", yet the
>> answer it came up with was "Toronto????".  Sure, it indicated
>> that it was guessing, and a city was guessed, but it was not
>> a U.S. city.
>>
>> Looking at Watson's 2nd and 3rd choices, one often finds the
>> category violated.  Sometimes it is the category specified in
>> the question, such as when "New Zealand's 2nd largest city"
>> was given (in the Jeopardy category ``"Church" and "State"'')
>> and neither its 2nd nor 3rd choice was a New Zealand city;
>> the 3rd choice being the "United States".
>>
>> This really did seem like a battle of the clickers.  It was often
>> obvious that the other two clicked, but Watson beat them on the
>> draw.  At least twice Brian Ritter beat Watson on the click when
>> Watson was very sure of its answer.  Another time Watson was
>> over it's threshold, but in its "probable" range (indicated by
>> yellow) and Ken Jennings beat it.  Likely it was working on
>> strengthening its certainty level before clicking.
>>
>> To give humans a chance, Watson should be programmed to click
>> with the average delay that a person who clicks within a second
>> of the completion of the clue gives -- or to give an inconsistent
>> delay distributed according to the temporal distribution of such
>> clicks.
>>
>> I would like to see figures for the number of times that the other
>> contestants clicked their buzzers, but Watson clicked first.
>>
>>      
>>> ...
>>> So I'm surprised that Watson made such elementary mistakes.
>>>        
>> It strongly suggests to me that Watson did not always determine the
>> category and then verify that its answer fit the category.  I
>> suppose it did for quotation marks (which mean that that string
>> is in the answer).
>>
>> In normal Jeopardy games, Alex often explains a category in English
>> but he did not do so in either day one or day two, except for the
>> initialism "APB" (which Watson's dictionary would certainly have).
>>
>> There were also a large number of questions which were quite
>> straight forward look-ups.  These would be no challenge for
>> Watson's algorithms.
>>
>> -- doug foxvog
>>
>>      
>>> John
>>>        
>> ============================================================   
>> doug foxvog doug@xxxxxxxxxx
>>      
> =============================================================
> doug foxvog    doug@xxxxxxxxxx   http://ProgressiveAustin.org
>
> "I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
> initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
>      - Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
> =============================================================
>
>
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>        (06)

-- 
---------------------    (07)

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Web site: http://www.semanticadvantage.com    (09)


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