Wednesday, February 23, 2011

How to beat the Watson Jeopardy computer


Via #1 Son.

UPDATE 24 February 2011 17:48: Boy, howdy, this sure has gotten some attention.  Welcome visitors from LaughingSquid and Neatorama, and, well, pretty much everywhere on teh Intarw3bz.  More geeky tech humor here, and you can always check out the other sort of stuff I blather about.  If you like it, stop back.  It's free!

UPDATE 1 March 2011 12:10: Hello visitors from DailyKos.   And perhaps I can gently point out to commenter Gray there that it should be clear to someone as smart as he that I didn't make this.  If you hover your mouse over the picture, you'll see a link to where I found it (this is hint #1).  Also, if you actually read my post, you'll find out how I found it (I won't give the secret away, but rather leave it as a challenge to the reader; but it's not very hard).

As to his "wingnut" comment, honi soit qui mal y pense, scooter.  But actually, you know - reading - would tell you the actual situation is much more subtle and nuanced than he lets on.  I've put a lot of info about who I am and what I think in the "Borepatch 101" post that you find by clicking on Albert Einstein.  Yeah, I know that it's cunningly hidden (under the "Who is this Borepatch guy, anyway?" label).  Fiendishly cunning.

Anyhow, if you bothered to look there, you'll find I talk about my politics.  There, I explain that I'm not a conservative.  Oops.  Well, maybe I'm a wingnut because I'm not a liberalI'm also not a Libertarian, so I'd suggest that what it all really means is that I'm not much of a joiner.  I don't know - maybe this is too subtle and nuanced for you.

But hey, thanks for all the traffic!  And to express my gratitude, let me just suggest that reading is a Good Thing.  Note: I just added the "mockery" tag to this post because, well, you can figure it out.

18 comments:

Joe said...

That was awesome.

Anonymous said...

Laughing so hard I'm crying here....

Best injection attack since Bobby Tables.

http://xkcd.com/327/

DaddyBear said...

You just made a bunch of geeks in Louisville very happy.

cybrus said...

Wow - what a perfect afternoon snack!

Borepatch said...

Geek Warrior, Bobby Tables is awesome. Don't mess with Mom. And sanitize your input, or you'll go to bed without any desert ...

Anonymous said...

Ha!

Jim

Richard said...

My idea is much less funny than this, but I was screaming for a video or musical jeopardy category. take that text parsing Watson.

Anonymous said...

Too bad the command "fsck -f -y /dev/hdb1" does not format a hard drive but only checks on the integrity of the file system. "fsck" stand for "file system check"

So the computer still wins.

Anonymous said...

@11:49AM Actually, Watson was the only one to get it correct.

Anonymous said...

In retrospect, they should have colluded to have Watson launch Folding@Home.

Jim

John said...

Oh, I'll definitely stop back. I discovered your blog through Tam and now check in about three times a week.

Unknown said...

mk2fs -F -c -F /dev/hdb1

or you could go for the always hilarious

rm -rf /

Danny Bloomfield said...

So great

Anonymous said...

Wow, what a total fail on the part of the creator.

Unknown said...

what the heck is the -f option? Brad and Ken didn't issue the same command either, one has an uppercase F, the other lowercase, neither of which are in the man page for fsck, what gives?

Anonymous said...

While amusing, the actual computation that Watson would use to give an answer would not be something put directly into a command line, therefore the hdd or ssd would not be formatted.

Unknown said...
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malaivelsiddha said...
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