Category: Internet & Technology

Man versus Machine: IBM’s Watson Supercomputer on Jeopardy

Image from Wired.com

Today I watched something that completely and totally captured my attention: IBM’s supercomputer, dubbed Watson, took on two Jeopardy champions (Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter). Watson is packing some serious hardware:

“The 360 Power7 chips that make up Watson’s brain represent IBM’s best and brightest processor technology. Each Power7 is capable of over 500 GB/second of aggregate bandwidth, making it particularly adept at manipulating data at high speeds. FLOPS-wise, a 3.55 GHz Power7 delivers 218 Linpack gigaflops. For comparison, the POWER2 SC processor, which was the chip that powered cyber-chessmaster Deep Blue, managed a paltry 0.48 gigaflops, with the whole machine delivering a mere 11.4 Linpack gigaflops.” – via HPCwire

So how did it go? In short, Watson got off to a commanding lead and was crushing it early on…until the humans adapted. You see, Watson is extremely accurate when it comes to coming up with the right question to fit the answer to the clue. There were a couple of flubs, but for the most part I’d say Watson was as good or better than the human champions. Where Watson truly shone though was reaction time. You could just tell watching the humans madly pressing the buzzer that Watson had them beat when it came to triggering the buzzer when it knew the answer. I noticed something though about halfway through: I think that the humans started buzzing in without knowing the answer.

This is pure speculation, but to me it looked like the two human champs switched to triggering the buzzer before the clue was even partly finished – I think they both realized that if they waited until they heard the full clue, Watson would continue to beat them. By the end of the game Rutter was at $5000, Watson was at $5000, and Jennings was at $2000. This is a far cry from the first 5 minutes where Watson was snagging all the questions.

I don’t know the mechanics of Jeopardy very well, but it looks like the contestant can buzz in at any time after the clue has started to be read aloud. It’s a risk buzzing in on something that you might not know the answer to, but it’s a call that a human can make on the fly – and one that a machine would be hard-pressed to make.

One of the things they didn’t explain fully was how Watson go the clue: they said it was “delivered as a text file”, but what does that mean exactly? Is there someone pressing a SUBMIT key on a keyboard as Alex Trebek finishes the clue? No, there would be too much latency with that approach. Does Watson get permission to read a text file as Trebek finished the question? That seems equally problematic – it would have to be machine driven somehow. Voice recognition would seem to be the only fair way to tackle this problem, but if Watson mis-recognized a word, it would throw the whole game off. This is something I hope they explain more about later on.

This was some fascinating TV! I’m looking forward to watching the next two episodes.

UPDATE: This article says that Watson is “fed the answer in text form at the same time the answer panel appears to the two human players.” That explains Watson’s edge in buzzing in – it can parse the text file faster than a human being can read the clue. The only way for the humans to win then is to buzz in before they read the clue. Gutsy!

Why is Outlook 2010 Still So Stupid?

It’s somewhat laughable that in 2010, Outlook still lacks the basic software intelligence to help make the lives of its users easier. If there are known elements (day of the week, day of the month, a time, and a time zone) it shouldn’t be difficult to create a function in the software that would automatically parse and order that data into an appointment – all that would be missing is a description and location (though the latter could be part of the data points). Despite everyone embracing the cloud, I still stand by Outlook as my pain productivity weapon for email, calender, tasks, contacts, etc. It works extremely well for me – far better than any cloud-based solution I’ve tried.

I should add that I’ve seen some Outlook add-ins that do some things like this – specifically with contacts – but I don’t like loading up Outlook with add-ins. The core functionality of Outlook needs to improve.

Creativity + A Capella + YouTube = Awesome

For all the junk on YouTube, there are some real gems – truly talented people who just want to share with the world. I admire the guts it takes to do something like this, especially knowing how harsh people can be on YouTube!

Busting Bandwidth Bugaboos: Troubleshooting ISP Speed Problems

Figure 1: What is this, 1994 all over again?

Whenever bandwidth is discussed, there’s always lots of finger pointing because there are so many variables, and players involved, that it’s rarely a simple issue. My particular bandwidth bugaboo this morning? I was ticked off that Dropbox [referral] was only uploading at 10 KB/s. I left a 900 MB transfer running all night and it wasn’t finished in the morning, and that’s when I discovered the awful speed. My first instinct was to point a finger at Dropbox, thinking there was some sort of bandwidth throttling going on. I did a speed test with a tool my ISP provides (speedtest.shaw.ca) and was shocked to see 1.7 Mbps downloads and 107 kbps uploads (Figure 1). It’s normally 20x that on downloads and 10x that on uploads, so I knew something was wrong beyond just Dropbox. Continue reading Busting Bandwidth Bugaboos: Troubleshooting ISP Speed Problems

Steve Jobs as Darth Vader

I can’t understand a word of this video, but the visuals are hilarious! It’s fascinating watch some users turn on Apple – they’re a company that has specialized in giving users a specific, highly controlled experience that for the most part works really well. But it seems Apple has finally crossed the line with the iPhone 4 “Antennagate” in terms of being too pushy with their users (“You’re holding it wrong”), and some people are lashing back. It’s very interesting to watch this play out.

Always Double-Check The Spell Check

I type fast, but sometimes my accuracy is awful – and this is a good illustration as to why it’s important to actually stop and read what the spell check is suggesting before you accept it and share that message. 😉

In Case Anyone Thought I Was Joking…

Just in case anyone thought that I was joking about ordering a Mac Mini, there’s the proof above…I know, I find it hard to believe myself. I don’t know what kinds of dreams I’ll have tonight…the ghost of Windows Computers Past might pay me a visit!

I’m in a CBC News Story on the iPad…oh so Briefly!

CBC news reporter Terri Trembath interviewed me for a story she was doing about iPads coming to Calgary. We talked for about ten minutes on camera, and I answered questions about the iPad, mobile computing, the fact that some people bought them and didn’t know what to use them for, but some people love them, etc.

In the clip above, she had asked me why I wasn’t getting an iPad, considering that I was a gadget geek – my response was that the kinds of stuff that I did required a keyboard, and that the iPad’s on-screen keyboard didn’t look ideal to me for entering information. So the clip is only part of my statement, and without the context of a question – which makes it seem a little odd to me. That’s the problem with being a tiny part of a larger story; you don’t get much camera time to explain your position.

Anyway, at least this time my company name got in the story. 😉

Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo 2010 Photos

On Saturday the 24th I attended the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo 2010 – I’d been to the event a few years ago, and back then it was much smaller. This time around, it was huge! It was also a little expensive – $25 at the door per person, and that didn’t get you anything more than in the door. It was a fun event, though it seems like they had too many people for the amount of space they had – it was crazy busy! It was really cool to see all the comics, action figures, graphic novels, famous people, and people dressed up as any number of different characters from comics, fantasy, and sci-fi. Lots of photographic opportunities if you were courageous enough to ask the people to stop so you could take their picture (sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t).

I took my Panasonic GF-1 to the event, but I really should have brought my Nikon D300. I thought I could get away with the nice and small GF-1 – especially after I stopped on the way to the show and purchased a 14-45mm lens (which is 28 to 90mm on the GF-1) – but ultimately I was really disappointed with the quality of the images from it. The GF-1’s images turn to crap noise-wise at anything past ISO 800, and I’m so used to shooting with the 20mm f/1.7 lens on the GF-1, it was an ugly transition for me to start shooting with an f/3.5 to f/5.6 lens. Picking up a new lens and having no practice with it is never a good idea, but at the time I thought I’d stand out too much if I brought my big iron (Nikon D300 + f/2.8 24-70mm lens)…there were plenty of others with big DSLRs there, so I should have just brought the damn thing.  The lighting was predictably awful, so more often than not my shots were ISO 1200 or ISO 1600 (since I abhor flash photography). Here are a few of the shots I took…

(Yeah, that’s Brent Spiner, AKA Mr. Data, above)