Is Anybody Watching Watson on Jeopardy?

[mark evans]

I agree that Watson had an unfair advantage with its ability to ring in before the other players, when all three knew the answers. Among three live players, one would expect that each would be successful in ringing in for approximately 1/3 of the clues in such circumstances. Yet, Watson rang in first virtually every time. Maybe a fairer test would be to remove, or at least reduce, the element of speed.

[jmk59]

That was my absolute first impression - that the computer had a mechanical advantage of speed ringing in. It seemed unfair because you could clearly tell that the other two both knew some answers and were unsuccessful in timing the buzzer. It definitely felt to me like it was enough of an advantage to affect the results.

So I dropped something off to my parents the first night and ended up sitting and watching with them. They are both about 80 and both were correctly impressed with Watson's overall ability to answer questions.

But ... hahaha. At one point Watson said, while picking a question, that he would "finish out the category". My dad was completely blown away by this. I explained some simple ways that Watson would be able to track which questions were done in a category. But with everything there was to be amazed by, my dad simply could not get past being impressed that he knew when there was only one answer left in a category.

My mom? She was by far most impressed that Watson was somehow able to answer in the form of a question.



J