Way to go, Watson !!

It was neat to watch (we held a pizza event for Tuesday's show).
Here's a some random observations an outsider to the domain of CS
might not immediately make:

1) While the answering part was somewhat impressive, the "playing
Jeopardy" part was unfair, I thought. Although Watson did have to
actuate a mechanical button, it was fed a text version of the question
(yes, I know, the answer) as soon as the question screen was revealed.
That's cheating, in my book. Watson should have had to read the screen
and/or listen to Alex. Instead it got a pre-processed version of the
question immediately. Presumably it could also cycle its button much
faster than a human could, too. As far as I can tell Watson did not
even have any audio input, so my guess is that as soon as it decided
it should answer it just started pushing the button, regardless of
whether Alex was still talking or not. That removes part of the game.

2) As expected, it did VERY well on questions that were essentially
single noun answers, or proper names. Simple fact lookup, even in
correlating a few different keywords in a question, isn't really AI,
it's just a massive and fast computer (Watson is room-sized). Big
Iron, as they say. Roughly 10 seconds to make word associations and
find a probable answer. Not bad.

3) It did very poorly on questions which needed a whole phrase for an
answer (e.g., "What is he is missing a leg?" as opposed to "What is
leg?", Watson's actual answer). The best it could do it seemed were
perhaps two word answers (the rhyming category, "Obama's Llamas" as an
example).

4) The interesting part is that no human could manually create the
fact and word associations that are its database, so this had to be
automated and tailored to the task. The developers themselves were
surprised at some answers, so this shows how "machine learning" can
give surprising results when one cannot conceptualize the entire
dataset over which learning happens.

In any case, sorta like crazy uncle Benny, Watson would be fun at a
party but still a long way from passing a Turing test:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

Jon.