Linkdump!

Alright, I may be a bit grumpy, hungry and tired at this point in time, but I figure it's about time I do another linkdump to clear some of these tabs, now that I got them all synced-up thanks to Firefox Sync. I'm drinking some grape juice and I have some apples, peanut butter and tuna (not mixed together, I'm not that strange) so let's power through them!

( It gets a bit lengthy... )

I... thought I had a lot more links than that. However, I feel better already...

Watson

So I finally got around to watching the IBM Grand Challenge of Watson on Jeopardy.

First off, I love the concept of just having this simple avatar. Note that it never turned red when it got a question wrong, it turned a dull amber-orange. Red would've been too HAL, I think.

His voice has a nice calming, tone to it, I actually kinda giggled every time he said a number, "for two hundred."

The number amounts that he chose during Daily Doubles and Final Jeopardy made Trebek raise an eyebrow. I have to admit, I don't think any Jeopardy players ever strayed from multiples of 100. To see Watson request to bet "six thousand, four hundred thirty five" is impressive in that it made me laugh. I don't think he was meant to make me laugh, but he did in its inimitable way.

Also, speaking of his oddities. he had the occasional "I'll hazard a guess" or "Let's finish off this topic", statements I didn't suspect he'd say! I know that would be easy to program in, but the rest of his programming seemed very robotic. I thought it was a nice touch that the IBM team gave him a personality.

Watson was a quick buzzer... Ken Jennings was visibly upset! Maybe they set Watson's buzzer timer too low. ;)

All in all, though, an impressive result from the IBM Grand Challenge Team. I commend their programming and I hope to hear more from the Watson programming in the future.

May I make an interesting relation? Trauma Team was released about a year ago, and Spike Speigel Gabriel Cunningham is given a computer assistant, RONI, to help him make his diagnoses. Watson was suggested to be used to be able to help diagnose medical patients. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like Watson running in a hospital short of five years from now.

However, I expect the doctors to be a bit more respectful... ;P

~~

Oh yeah! I knew there was something else I wanted to add to my Linkdump: zillabean mentioned a few odd books awhile back, and I grabbed one of them, called "Alien Hand Syndrome". It's a bunch of strange things that have happened over the course of human history. Anyone who listens to the Dean Blundell Show on The Edge in the mornings will occasionally hear about the "Edge Files" (check their podcasts for older shows which have the title "Edge Files"), which involve odd-yet-true stories that are happening in the news, such as the hermaphorditic dog (I can't make this stuff up, and even if I had, I'm sure it's happened!) - anyways, I'm losing the trail here. The book comes from the website "Damn Interesting" and has a whole bunch of odd stories, such as the titular Alien Hand Syndrome, Exploding Lakes, Fartistes (yes, they're musical farters), and Mad Jack Churchill. The book collects most of the stories from the website, so I'd suggest either reading the book or losing a few hours on the website. :)