Man vs Machine

Well, man vs a machine and all of the people who designed the processes behind it.

If you haven’t heard, an IBM computer is on Jeopardy!. I heard a few details on the radio that confirm my suspicions. There will be cheating involved.

At first the folks at IBM didn’t want to use the signal button, they wanted to just electronically transmit the answer. When the Jeopardy! people insisted that they use the button, IBM complained that they were imposing human limitations on their machine. Well, yeah, since this is supposed to be a competition against humans and that’s part of the rules.

Next comes the part I was thinking about – when the Watson computer hits the button to answer. Your average human contestant has to wait until the answer is read and then hit the button, so they anticipate when that will be. If they ring in early there is a .25 second penalty. Watson knows when the light goes on indicating that it can hit the button and never makes a mistake on the timing and it can respond faster than a human. That sure is fair and just like a human.

One of the comebacks is that the humans have the advantage because they understand the nuance of the questions and it takes Watson 2 – 3 seconds to figure it out. In other words, less time than it takes to read the answer. And I thought the whole point was to demonstrate that the computer could understand nuance. So they cheat.

Also, Watson gets the answer as electronic text, no reading involved the way the humans do it – or listening if they are blind as has happened. It’s getting more and more human all the time here.

Now let’s get to the Daily Double wagering. Watson calculates exactly how many questions are left, how much money can still be won and how much it needs – and what it’s opponents scores are and determines it’s wager based on what it can afford to lose and what it needs to win based on criteria that few if any humans can track at any time let alone on a TV stage in the middle of a Jeopardy! game. Not much of an advantage there. Well, that one is not that incredible and advantage, but it is one.

And then there’s the memory that the machine has. Do you think it can store more answers than the average human can?

Look, I’m intrigued by the logic behind this. Interpreting the answers and then searching for the right answers based on English language is an interesting challenge. They say it has shown no insight into how the human brain works, but I can see it leading to language research. It is being mentioned as a way to do fast research since it can search, say, all medical journals and texts and then return an answer that a doctor can evaluate and use or discard.

I think this is just another example where, when humans can quantify how a task is performed then figure out how to mechanize it, they can build a machine that is faster and stronger than a human. We’ve had steam hammers, electronic calculators, computers, computers that play chess (Deep Blue) and now this. That’s fine. We’ll see a test of how well people can make a machine to perform a task that has only been done before by humans. Just don’t call it a fair contest when the machine is allowed to have advantages unrelated to the human component that is being touted – namely language interpretation and solution selection. That’s like saying a car racing a human is fair because all you’re testing is how to navigate the race course mechanically.

Yeah, I’ll watch it. Like I said, it’s an intriguing problem they’ve apparently solved and I want to see the demonstration. I just want them to admit that there is no fair contest being waged here. What we have is a very long, and hopefully interesting, commercial for IBM.