Over the Valentine’s Day week, IBM’s expert-system Watson took on all-time Jeopardy! winners Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and pretty much trounced them. This has generated a great deal of speculation and a lot of buzz for IBM. If nothing else, this has been a huge publicity for IBM and Watson and possibly even Jeopardy! The event has also generated a notable amount of discussion from Ken Jennings himself as well as audience members and participants.

Chris Higgins of mental_floss wrapped up three different articles about the event, two by Ken Jennings, that describe his experience and how the whole thing went down. They’re witting, interesting, and very human,

Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma screen for a face. Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It’s very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.

Yes, he went there.

The quote is from the first article by Ken Jennings published in Slate, “My Puny Human Brain: Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it’s like to play against a supercomputer”, posted in Slate discussing his brain matter verses silicon matter. His commentary is very much in contrast to how Greg Lindsay approached the same matter during his own experience going up against Watson in a series of private matches. Perhaps IBM got Watson a little bit “smarter” since that match. However, there was one big difference, where Lindsay spoke about how he crafted his stratagem for playing Jeopardy! against the clues and board, Jennings spoke about how he played against other players.

In fact, Watson’s implacable psychology probably dealt Jennings the greatest blow as Watson cannot be intimidated and does not suffer from frustration or demoralization.

The second article by Jennings covers the unfair advantage that Watson has when it comes to reflexes. In an article written for the New York Daily News, “Ken Jennings Op-Ed: ‘Jeopardy!‘ champ says computer nemesis Watson had unfair advantages”, he covers the solenoid that acts as Watson’s “thumb” to hit the buzzer. He likens the problem to if the folk hero John Henry had to go up against the steam engine of sheer strength alone and not just dexterity and human passion.

Finally, an article by Jeremy Singer-Vines Slate article quotes a lot of statistics and analysis on how Jeopardy! works in “I’ll Take Jeopardy! Trivia for $200, Alex: The most common categories and hardest clues in the game show’s long history. Plus: Where to find the Daily Doubles.” This reminds me a lot more of the run-down above by Greg Lindsay and how to play the board—it’s probably also a good examination of how the IBM programmers probably trained Watson for his appearance on the game show and what kind of data mining would have been used before the fact. Expert-systems do need a data set to focus on and it certainly gives them the edge even on well prepared humans.

The given articles are certainly a good read and an excellent primer into the human interaction with a modern-day expert-system. If you want to keep up on how we might expect these systems to develop, you would do your homework well reading up on them. And, no, I don’t think we’ll be welcoming our new Watson overlords anytime soon.

Although, I wouldn’t mind an expert-system like Watson to aid my casual research.

Wiki-Watson anyone?