On Watson on Jeopardy

[xiphias]

In case you haven't see the results yet,

I bet Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings had some pretty mixed feelings at that match.

In order to be a Jeopardy champion, you have to have a good competitive streak, so they can't have liked losing.

On the other hand, in order to be a Jeopardy champion, you also have to be a pretty serious geek, and, to a pretty serious geek, a computer that can win at Jeopardy is really freakin' cool.

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

By the way, were you involved in any way with this? I'd heard that they did practice matches against former Jeopardy contestants, and was wondering if they'd tapped you. I couldn't remember if you had any IBM connections.

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Nope. Still haven't made it on the show, although per an in-person audition back in November, I'm in the contestant pool through May 2012. I strongly suspect at this point I'm probably the record holder for most passed the test tryouts without getting on the show.

I did work at IBM for a summer back in 1980, and they did make me a fulltime offer, which I turned down. The closest I came to this was that Ed Hovy, a natural language understanding researcher who had a short clip on Tuesday show, is both a former AI grad school classmate and co-worker of mine, although we've not been in touch in years.