Brad Ideas - Futurism - Comments

Need to know

Shiv prakash — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 12:16:33 -0700

The RoboCars are really the victory of science ie artificial intelligence and robotics. I also know my question may occur foolish if, but I need to know can the car will be able to take decision when something would be moving fastly above car say. something huge dropping above it. I know this is not checked by any individual driving the car but, i would be great if It can take decision when any action like this happens. if these module are included then I say its great and more inspiring.

thanks

Sprawl costs money, robocars will make cities cheaper.

Anonymous — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 16:29:45 -0700

One nice thing about robocars is it should be practical to meter usage and toll streets. We might even end up with privatized roadway systems. Right now everyone just pays taxes and highways get built where planners and politicians figure they'd make sense. Sprawl is in many ways being subsidized.

In the future, the consumer pays directly and even if energy and infrastructure are marginal costs, human psychology dictates we'll be cheapskates. Also, just because highways will be narrower and lighter because of smaller robocars, there's the more unavoidable cost of earthworks, land acquisition, and more road to maintain and monitor.

I see the reduced need for parking lots and super highways or expensive mass transit infrastructure making urban density cheaper. Or conventional suburbs where people have nice yards and free standing homes slightly more compact. Robotaxi and deliverbot service may be better(shorter wait times) and cheaper in denser environments as well(more units nearby at any given time).

I think you are right that maybe people won't pay huge premiums for sub-optimal housing in very dense locales like central San Francisco if you can get there in no time flat.

But if you can have a yard and space in a conventional suburb, and robocars end up making it even more quiet and safer than it was before, would you pay extra money to get some acreage in the countryside? I wouldn't. Also I guess there are some economic benefits to building multi-unit apartment buildings, hospital and hotels as high-rises, etc. Not everyone will live and work in places like this, but they will stick around.

Words all at once

brad — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 15:39:10 -0800

They do actually discuss this. They say that since the human’s retinas get the image when it shows and Watson gets the IP packet, this is “fair” as a contest of man and machine. Yes, humans can’t grok and entire screen of text in an instant to turn it into words, but neither can Watson understand the words instantly.

One could argue a fair test might be to watch human eyes to figure out the average time it takes them to read the passage, and give the words to Watson in groupings matching typical human reading. That would probably eat up a second or so from Watson’s time, and IBM would have answered that by just adding more cores. So it may not have been fruitful.

One could also ask Watson to do OCR. It would do that faster than humans can read though — today’s OCR systems on a single core can read an entire page in a second or two. On 2800 cores it would be a blip.

But the contest was not about reading, and it was not really supposed to be about buzzing. It was supposed to be a test of question answering. It just happens that Jeopardy is the most famous and well understood way to do that, one the public would tune in for.

A game of beat the switch

DensityDuck — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:33:51 -0800

Well, human players can start working out the solution after only a few words, but Watson gets ALL the words simultaneously.

Indeed, it would be interesting to see what Watson would do if it were presented the clues "one word at a time", similar to the (presumed) way that the humans receive them. It would be neat to see the answer evolve as the clue was completely revealed!

I'd have *liked* to see an indicator of whether the human players buzzed in, and when they buzzed in relative to Watson; but, of course, that would reveal that it was indeed just a game of beat-the-switch.

They documented that

brad — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 23:29:10 -0800

They learned daily doubles appeared mostly in row 4, then in rows 3 and 5, and for some reason mostly in column 1.

Hunting for them is exactly what it was doing, not to bet heavily, but mostly to deprive the other players of the chance to use them, since with those two players, these would have been their real chance to win enough money to beat Watson.

answer selection

Anon Y. Mouse — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 22:00:42 -0800

Another oddity in Watson's game play was how it picked the next
answer. It seemed to be going across the board from category to
category at the same dollar level, or bouncing around the board
seemingly at random, as opposed to working down a single category
as most humans do. I have occasionally seen people play this way,
most likely looking for the Daily Doubles. I don't know what
Watson's algorithm would be.

Percentage of correct answers

Randy — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:40:52 -0800

Did anyone keep track of Watson's percentage of correct answers out of the total number of questions? I didn't, although I suppose I could go back and look at the recording.

I also found it compelling that Watson would essentially say, "I don't know," when his confidence is low. That's almost as important as getting the correct answer.

Randy.

That would be the only fair way to do it

brad — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:34:23 -0800

Though I would disagree that it was fair to remove categories that need explanation. Watson should just get the explanation. As it turns out, Watson did OK at learning about categories by example.

Watson would also do almost perfectly at audio and video clues with a large library of fingerprinted audio and video. Recognizing very similar pictures and sounds is mostly a solved problem. As such it would not be impressive, nor good for the humans, but it would be a special algorithm in Watson and some work, so it is fine to have left them out. Leaving out a hard, unsolved problem reduces the contest a small bit.

The humans had trouble with the keyboard keys category too, but I doubt Watson would ever have gotten it.

Nova did do that

brad — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:29:52 -0800

But it was nothing like this. The Nova was like most other such shows, with footage shot and edited by Nova. Jeopardy contained a number of IBM-made films about how great IBM was, how they planned to use Watson for business etc. They really felt very different in style.

It's been stated in several

Tom Galloway — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 04:03:57 -0800

It's been stated in several places that the games for the Watson match were chosen at random by a third party from games written by the usual J! writers for regular J!. And then either scrubbed for visual/audio clues and categories that only make sense after Alex explains them with an example, or boards with such clues/categories weren't included in the set the selection was made from.

Dunno how Watson was getting

Tom Galloway — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 04:00:33 -0800

Dunno how Watson was getting the signal, but the buzzers are unlocked by a J! staffer other than Alex Trebek hitting a button. I know that past J! multi-game players have said there was a difference in rhythm when different staffers were responsible for this in their games.

"The shows also contain

tehag — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 01:11:17 -0800

"The shows also contain total love-fest pieces about IBM"

It's my understanding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its pseudo-science show Nova broadcast an hour-long commercial for IBM under the guise of "news" and "education."

It is an advantage

brad — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 23:46:14 -0800

These are advantages. Not easy to figure out how to eliminate them (other than a rules change to make buzz speed not a factor, ie. if you buzz at all near the mark, you get a random chance of being chosen.) I think Watson could learn to follow the cadence as the humans do. They clearly are reading ahead since they know when he is finished before he finishes in order to buzz in. It may be hard to do, but I think a good player can train to ignore Trebek and just read the clue, and I think a great player has to do that, just for buzzing. People however can figure out a clue only from the first few words, something Watson is not good at, so in many cases they know whether they will buzz when they have only read (or heard) half the clue. Watson as yet doesn’t do that.

Watson had the advantage

Anon Y. Mouse — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 23:34:09 -0800

Supplying the answer as text to Watson gives the machine an
advantage, unless it is supplied word by word as Alex speaks
it. It's hard to ignore Alex and read ahead -- try it sometime.
And as you said, giving Watson a "OK to buzz" signal is a big
advantage as well. If the human contestants use the light signal,
they are subject to the delays introduced by the nervous system.
If they ignore the light signal and try to time it, they will
miss occasionally, while Watson will not. I think this is why
Watson was able to win the race to buzz in so often. I've read
accounts of people who have been on the show, and they say that
being able to buzz in first is a BIG part of winning. Watson
will never buzz in early, and it can always buzz in instantly.

The odd (to humans) wagers on daily doubles and final Jeopardy
drew some laughs from the audience, but they're probably due to
carrying out fractional calculations to the dollar. The wagers
would have seemed more 'natural' had they been rounded to the
nearest hundred.

Same pace as he reads them?

brad — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:38:03 -0800

Hmm. I would doubt it is at the same pace as he reads them. Watson needs 2-6 seconds to answer a question, and you can’t buzz in until Alex finishes reading, so you need to be confident you know the answer before then. Since the clues appear on the board and anybody can read text faster than listen to Trebek the right thing to do would be to feed the words at the same speed as a fast reader. Alternately you could let Watson OCR them from the screen, but it would do that faster than a human can read, much faster.

Now, part of the demonstration is to show what Watson can do better than people, and so one could argue that the OCR approach is fair. OCR would get few errors if given the video feed of the puzzle screen, so it might be simpler just to time-trial the OCR and figure out how long it takes and give Watson the text in that mode.

Speech recognition would be way too slow, Watson would have to buzz in very early and just hope it is right. Since it is right over 90% of the time, that would actually be a winning strategy, but they appear to have it evaluate confidence before buzzing.

The way the buzzer works is if you buzz in too early, you wait 0.2 seconds before you can buzz again, and if somebody else had better timing, they will then beat you. We have to understand just how it gets the signal about when to buzz. One method that I think would make sense would be for Watson to have the text, and to also be listening to Trebek and figuring out with speech recognition when he finishes. It would do pretty well at that since it doesn’t have to recognize the last word, just its approximate duration and the silence after it. But the question is, what enables the buzzer? Is a J staffer listening to Alex and enabling it? Does Alex himself push a button to enable the buzzer? Since it presumably is a human, the trick is to time that human and push close to that to win. Since you can’t do that exactly, all players will win some of the time. If Watson is getting an electronic “Ok to push now” signal it has an unfair advantage.