Watson was not specialized for different categories. It would learn categories—during a game, after seeing question-answer pairs from it. It ignored category titles,
I have a really hard time believing this. A lot of the categories on Jeopardy recur regularly and pose the same types of puzzles again and again. IBM would have been crazy not to take advantage of this regularity. Or at least to pay attention to the category titles in evaluating possible answers.
*shrug* I mean, if you want to claim that the makers of IBM coordinated to lie about this point, go ahead, but don’t expect to me to bother discussing this with you at that point.
If your comment was inaccurate, it would probably be because you were mistaken and perhaps something you read was mistaken, not that IBM had coordinated to lie.
Yeah, so as it happens, I was misremembering—it doesn’t ignore category titles, it just doesn’t weight them very highly. Which FWIW still contradicts what brazil84 was suggesting it does. :P
I didn’t say it ignores categories—it knows which questions go together in a category, and learns what to use for a given category as it sees question-answer pairs for it. What I said was that it ignores category titles.
I have a really hard time believing this. A lot of the categories on Jeopardy recur regularly and pose the same types of puzzles again and again. IBM would have been crazy not to take advantage of this regularity. Or at least to pay attention to the category titles in evaluating possible answers.
*shrug* I mean, if you want to claim that the makers of IBM coordinated to lie about this point, go ahead, but don’t expect to me to bother discussing this with you at that point.
If your comment was inaccurate, it would probably be because you were mistaken and perhaps something you read was mistaken, not that IBM had coordinated to lie.
Yeah, so as it happens, I was misremembering—it doesn’t ignore category titles, it just doesn’t weight them very highly. Which FWIW still contradicts what brazil84 was suggesting it does. :P
Here’s a quote I found from the IBM research blog:
Seems to me that at a minimum, this shows that Watson does not ignore category titles.
I didn’t say it ignores categories—it knows which questions go together in a category, and learns what to use for a given category as it sees question-answer pairs for it. What I said was that it ignores category titles.
However as it happened I was wrong about this; slight misremembrance, sorry. Watson does note category titles, it just doesn’t weight them very highly. Apparently it learned this automatically during its training games. Source: http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/related-content/toronto.html