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Comment by tejaswiy | Hacker News Reader

What in the world. The challenge was the natural language processing. Considering that Watson did that part admirably well, complaining about computers having better reflexes is just silly.

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The buzzer timing is a larger part of winning than knowing the answers. I would say, even though Jennings never does, that it was a huge advantage.

But the buzzer timing is also part of Jeopardy. It's just a part of the game. You can change the game to disadvantage the computer, but then why not change other rules like require all responses to be handwritten using a hand with human blood flowing through it to a pumping heart, which is connected to a working human brain.

The point is that while Watson is a big step forward in language processing and information retrieval, it's unfair to conclude that he does these things as well as the best humans. Jeopardy isn't a particularly good test of these abilities (though it is good theater) because the additional variable of buzzer-timing screws up your results.

As was pointed out by another commenter, if the game had been "everyone who knows the answer write it down and get credit", Watson probably wouldn't have won, and absolutely not by so much.

So I think Jennings is just cautioning us not to assume that AI has achieved human level language and information capabilities when really a totally unrelated and unimpressive other dimension of the game is the culprit.

I seem to recall Kasparov complaining of unfairness/cheating too, when he was beat by Deep Blue.

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